


The Imperials

by estherlyon



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Arranged Marriage, Canon-Typical Violence, Espionage, F/M, Mutual Pining, Sharing a Bed, Slow Burn, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, The Americans AU, Undercover as a Couple
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-16
Updated: 2017-12-15
Packaged: 2018-12-03 01:52:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 26
Words: 91,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11522058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/estherlyon/pseuds/estherlyon
Summary: Joreth Sward and his wife Kestrel are a perfectly ordinary couple living an apparently comfortable and uneventful life in Imperial Center, as Coruscant became known after the rise of the Galactic Empire. That is, until an Imperial officer named Orson Krennic moves into their building.The "The Americans AU" that wouldn't leave me alone.





	1. That nice couple a few doors down

**Author's Note:**

> I'm posting this now so I don't lose my nerve. This has been in my head since I saw RO, honestly. I don't know how long this is going to be... 
> 
> I also have no idea what I'm doing, even though I have it plotted out, so any feedback/concrit is welcome. English is not my first language and I'll be editing this online for the next few hours, so ignore any glaring mistakes.
> 
> I'm also estherlyon on tumblr if you ever want to chat (yes, I like George Eliot).

It was supposed to be nondescript. An ordinary soap scented with what passed for a flower mixture from Naboo found in any convenience store on this planet. Not quite cheap, but not really expensive. It went beautifully with her persona. He never knew and probably would never know if she would actually pick it for herself in another life. And despite everything, he let it become something meaningful to him. One day, he slid into bed late at night after a meeting and what was meant to be a simple deep breath unfurled it in his chest: the exact same feeling he got before this arrangement, when he would arrive on base after a mission. A feeling of safety, a feeling of being home.

Now he felt it emanating from her pillow next to his, her side of the bed with the sheets all askew and already cold. He stared at the ceiling for a while and, getting up, felt his bones crack in his upper back as he rolled his shoulders. He padded to the kitchen, from where he heard the soft sounds of the holonews and the smell of syrup was wafting in the air. She was at the sink, still wearing her nightclothes, holding a knife over an empty chopping block, apparently lost in thought. He came up behind her, shoved the small messy braid her hair was in from her shoulder and planted a kiss at the spot it met her neck at the same time that he put out a hand to stop her from stabbing him.

“Stop,” she said, firmly.

“You’re supposed to be my wife.”

She let out a long-suffering sigh and he slowly let go of the knife in her hand. She turned around and raised an eyebrow at him. He stepped back and gave her some space.

“We have a new neighbor, darling,” and as he rummaged in the kitchen cabinets for caff and some bread, he only hummed in reply and she continued, “an Orson Krennic. An engineer, apparently. We should be excited about this. It is being said in the building that he’s met the Emperor himself once.”

He pressed his lips together and gestured with his head to their bedroom. She followed him and he closed the door.

“Are you kidding me?”

“Not at all.”

“We should-“

“Beware but also, I dunno, welcome him into the building?” She said with a sweet smile.

He grinned at her. A rare occurance, he knew.

“Oh, definitely. You’ll bake something?”

She glowered at him for a few seconds. “Like the wonderful little wife that I am. Yes.”

**

He was Joreth Sward, an Alderaanian lieutenant in the Imperial Navy, who lived with his lovely wife, Kestrel, in a building that housed the upper echelons of the Empire. Usually a lieutenant would not be able to afford living in such luxury, but Kestrel had a civilian job in a private firm that had a contract to handle Imperial cargo shipments. Due to the complexity of her job and the crazy hours she usually put in at a central office in the heart of Coruscant, her salary more than covered the costs of their expensive apartment, their dining habits, and Kestrel’s taste for theater and holofilms. Despite being Alderaanian, a planet whose leaders were somewhat knowingly critical of Imperial rule, Sward was a loyal subject of the Empeire, an enthusiast of its expansion across the Galaxy. They were the perfect Imperial couple. Both came from less than stellar backgrounds, but had risen in its ranks: an example to those across the Galaxy that under Imperial rule, anyone could succeed.

Except Joreth and Kestrel had not met while she was on a business trip to Bespin, where he was serving at the time. He had not looked at her across a bar and been immediately smitten and she had not thought his jokes were hilarious. They hadn’t gone out the following day, to a restaurant that served Alderaanian food, where he had pointed out that he could cook those dishes for her a thousand times better if she would let him.

Joreth and Kestrel had met in a conference room in a Mon Calamari cruiser from where the intelligence branch of the Alliance to Restore the Republic was running its operations. They had actually been introduced by Davits Draven, the head of that division, at the tender ages of 20 and 23, and told that like many before them, they were being placed on a mission together. This was the moment that their training – Joreth’s more than Kestrel’s, as he sensed from Draven’s tone – would really be put to the test. They had files with their background stories with details that they should memorize. They were to forego all contact with their previous lives; contact with the Alliance would be made through drops or through handlers, whose identities they weren’t going to know. These were the most airtight covers they had to infiltrate the Empire and any opportunity this afforded them to gather information was not to be wasted. Even something seemingly small and insignificant as a new neighbor.

For that reason, by the time Joreth was back home from work that same evening, he found Kestrel mixing a bowl of blue milk, eggs and flour, which she stopped doing to point him in the direction of their bedroom, the one place in the apartment that they were completely sure they were not being listened to.

“Something’s come up,” she said, as soon as he closed the door behind them, “apparently a contact between a Partisan cell in Jedha and one of ours in the Ring of Kafrene is doing some double dealing. We got a transmission saying he’s been sighted here and they’ve asked us to deal with him. As soon as possible.”

He wiped at a smudge of flour she had on her cheek.

“And you thought this was a good time to start a cake?”

She rolled her eyes, “I didn’t know what time you’d be back. Figured I’d get some head start on the welcoming present for what’s-his-name.”

“Alright. Bake the cake and I’ll prep... See if there’s any more instructions. I need to get out of this uniform.”

They had been doing this for three years now and were still a young couple. The Swards went out a lot in the evenings and that was when they actually seemed really young to their neighbors, laughing their way down to the hangar to grab their ship for a night out. No one seemed to suspect that beneath his countless civilian jackets and tucked under the waistband of her fashionable but casual trousers were blasters and knives. He was retrieving his blaster from the hidden compartment in their closet when she appeared, drying her hands in the tunic she was wearing.

It was silent in the room and she went over to a small entertainment system and turned on some music, better to make it more believable that they were simply going out. She put on a pair of comfortable slacks and as she walked past him into the adjoining ‘fresher, he caught again the scent of that damnable soap, mixed in with Corellian rum, which he figured she had used to flavor the dough.

“We aren’t supposed to just grab him. If we can find out what it is he’s been passing the Imps before dealing with him, the better, “ she said, pulling on a pair of practical boots.

“Figured as much,” he said, going over his own notes on a flimsi. “You ready?”

She hid a fold-out truncheon in her boot, under the seam of her trousers.

“After you.”

**

The assignment went spectacularly to hell. The man had his arm in a sling and babbled only nonsense as soon as Joreth had pulled him into an alleyway in one of the city’s lower levels. Kestrel had stayed in the ship, pretending she was waiting for him to pick something up in a large drug store, one level above. At the sound of raised voices, two stormstroopers appeared, asking what was going on and then for the two men’s scandocs. Joreth’s documentation was fine, but he couldn’t risk the other man being identified. He pretended to have dropped his gloves and shot both ‘troopers without any hesitation. He said one word into his comlink and less than minute afterwards, Kestrel was sliding the ship in front of them. Joreth shoved the man inside the cargo hold, following him, where he proceeded to bind the man’s wrists and to gag him.

“Joreth! We’ve got company!”

He ran into the cockpit and found Kestrel less paying attention to where they were going than keeping an eye on two Imperial security speeders, which were suddenly tailing them.

“Any ideas on how to lose them or can I do my own thing while you deal with our special guest?”

“Go ahead.”

“I don’t want to hear it later if I do anything you don’t like.”

“For kriff’s sake,” she only raised an eyebrow at him in response, “it’s been farking three years, you’d think-“

“Trust goes both ways, you know.”

“Exactly. Do… whatever… while I see if he’s staying put. I tied him up but you never know.”

“Alright. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

He sighed, but figured he had asked for it. Kestrel wasn’t Alliance. That was one of the only things he knew about her before all this started, because that was what Draven had let him know when he was first briefed. Apparently, she was ideal for the job because she was an expert slicer; she had, before, led different lives under different aliases. She also spoke with a perfect Coruscanti accent and when she wanted, she could act like she had lived there all her life.

Draven also let him know that her participation in this scheme was part of an arrangement with Saw Gerrera, an old rebel fighter who was on the verge of splitting from the Alliance. Despite the many misgivings old guard politicians such as Mon Mothma of Chandrila and Bail Organa of Alderaan had about Gerrera's methods, Draven was able to convince them of one last effort to ensure his collaboration.  Davits Draven wasn't as scrupulous of the means employed to defeat the Empire as the politicians were, for one thing. For this mission specifically, Gerrera had turned over to the Alliance someone who he claimed was one of his best fighters: a petite brunette who had the reputation of having learned to hack into comm signals and defuse bombs before she was ten years old. She had, as far as Joreth could gather, spent at least two years training under Draven’s agents before that afternoon on the Mon Calamari cruiser, where it had taken every ounce of his self-control not to feel affected by the contrast of dark brown hair and pale skin and by the sheer steely resolve of her green eyes.

The first time they were in dire straits together, though, Joreth quickly learned that one could be removed from a partisan’s cell like Gerrera’s, but that it would take more than two years of training to beat it out of one’s instincts. Kestrel was reckless, quick to lash out when in danger and to shuffle their mission priorities on the spot, like the time he found her in a deserted park sticking a vibroblade in a man’s neck after she had caught him assaulting a young girl.

“You have no idea what it’s like being a woman in this Galaxy. You can shove your lecture up your arse,” she had said when he all but grabbed her and dragged her back to their ship.

He knew she was right, but that didn’t mean that he wasn't almost always exasperated when they had to run assignments together. He usually told himself that he could care less what she did when she was on her own. However, he knew that under torture, he would have to resort to all of his training not to admit that he felt relieved every time he heard her come into their apartment unscathed after an outing, and not only because of their covers.

When he went back to see how the captured man was doing, he found him wrestling against his bidings, biting down on the gag. Joreth debated what to do and decided to ungag him for a while.

“I’m telling you – I have information that’s valuable to the Alliance, if you kill me now-“

“I’m supposed to believe the Empire is building a weapon that kills planets fueled with the crystals that powered Jedi’s lightsabers? Honestly. You think I’m an idiot?”

“Listen-“

“We don’t have time to do this now. If the Imps find you with us you’re as good as dead, too. So shut the hell up and stay quiet. Otherwise I’m sending my partner to deal with you and, believe me, I’m the more lenient of us two.”

He didn’t give the man time to respond, just shoved the gag back in his mouth and afterwards clocked him on the chin to guarantee that he’d be quiet at least until they got to whatever safe spot Kestrel was taking them to. He ambled towards the cockpit again and then froze at what he saw on the viewport.

“Are you insan-“

Kestrel immediately cut him off through clenched teeth, “what did I say to you?”

“But this is…”

“They’ll never think to look for us here. I lost them somewhere on the mid-levels," she shoved her index finger in his chest, "I’m landing this thing in our hangar, I’m getting out of this ship, I’m going to finish that cake. And then we’re going to meet our new neighbor. I hope you handled what it's in the back of our ship.”

It took him a few seconds to cool down and see that she was right. No one had ever given them reason to suspect they were believed to be anything other than the Swards, the beautiful couple in their building who the old ladies always asked when they were having children. No stormtrooper in their right mind would come looking for an absconded suspect in an Imperial lieutenant’s private hangar. He followed her out, hoping his clothes didn’t stink too much of blaster discharge if they ran into anyone.

When they arrived at their door, she furiously punched in their code and walked in without looking back at him, heading straight for the bedroom in order to relieve herself of her weapons. He opened the cooler and took out some ale, before he even took off his jacket. He opened and closed the hand he had used to punch their newly acquired charge on the face as he turned the oven lights on and saw that Kestrel's Corellian rum cake had baked beautifully. He decided to cut Kestrel some slack and take it out himself, since he was actually the one with the talent in the kitchen.

He had shrugged off his jacket and the hat he usually wore as a disguise and was half-way through the bottle when Kestrel appeared back in the kitchen, wearing loose-fitting slacks and a tank top.

“Your cake looks good,” he said from his spot in the kitchen island.

She shrugged.

“You think I don’t trust you.”

She shrugged again.

He decided this was it. That it was time for some sort of gesture that would make her finally get it in her head that he trusted her, her gut instinct, and that if this was any other sort of life, he wished he actually knew her, more than what he was able to deduce from their three years living together in contrived intimacy. That he cared, despite the occasional disdain she showed him.

“Cassian,” he said, turning the bottle in his grip and pretending to examine its lable.

“What?” she almost gulped, from where she was lining the top of the cake with berries.

“Cassian,” he repeated, “my name. You don’t need to tell me yours.”

She put the last berry on the cake and dusted her hands on the side of her pants. She blinked at him like one of the tiny birds he remembered from his home planet, before shaking her head and grabbing a jacket from the hanger on one of the kitchen walls.

“Let’s go see what’s the deal with this Krennic fellow.”

**

As they stood outside their neighbor’s door, Cassian noticed that his wife fidgeted a bit even if carefully holding the cake in a container. He suppressed a smile, knowing that she was naturally prickly around new people despite what he knew were years fighting through subterfuge.

“Stop doing that with your mouth,” she hissed, softly bumping her hips against his.

He blinked innocently at her, “stop fidgeting, then. You’ll drop this thing before the man even has a chance to open the d- there he is! Hello!”

They sported identical genial smiles and the man across from them seemed confused for a while.

“Hello,” Kestrel said, all friendly ease, “we’re your neighbors on this floor, Kestrel and Joreth. We’re here to welcome you to our building.”

Krennic shot them a suave smile and gestured for them to come in, all polite pleasantries spoken with a nice Core accent, though not quite similar to Kestrel’s. Cassian walked inside, as she handed the older man the container with the cake.

“I hope you like Corellian rum,” she said.

And then something happened. It took a microsecond but it made his skin prickle. He saw Kestrel’s eyes take in the man in front of them and they did something he had never seen them do. They widened imperceptibly and her pupils closed a few millimeters. He noticed she slightly bit her lower lip. He instinctively came to stand next to her, a hand subtly resting against the waistband of her slacks on her lower back.

“This looks delicious, Kestrel,” Krennic said, as he put the cake on his dining table and gestured for them to come further into the apartment, “if you’re not too busy, you should stay for dinner. I was just about to order something.”

She looked up at him, his fireball wife, all taut muscles, and he took the lead being the excellent husband he was supposed to be and felt like he failed at being more often than not.

“Oh, no, thanks. We’ve already eaten. We’ve just come for a quick hello. But some other time, we’ll definitely stay. Kestrel knows all the best places to order from around here.”

Orson Krennic seemed nice, at first sight, showing an interest in their respective occupations, eager to talk about his engineering position. A nice, wholesome Imp. Someone Cassian knew he should cultivate, which he gathered wouldn’t be difficult, by the readiness he demonstrated in hosting them. But if Kestrel was letting any unease show, as small as it was, they should probably address it beforehand. The walk back to their apartment was silent, his hand still pressed against Kestrel’s back. He leaned into her and smelled her hair as she typed in the code to their door. She once again headed to their bedroom without giving him a second glance, but this time he followed her. He had given her today more than they had ever given any other agent he had ever worked with. He shut the door to their bedroom behind him and as she whirled around to face him, he kept his face as neutral as possible.

“You want to tell me what that was all about?”


	2. The man in white

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING: This chapter mentions sexual assault and horrible things women go through in war. There's also some violence.
> 
> I'm still struggling with formatting on this website.
> 
> Thanks to all who left kudos and comments. They really mean a lot.

Kestrel reeled inside from his question. She thought she had managed to remain neutral even as she faced someone who could only be described as a ghost, or at least that he would be watching Krennic – as he should have been - instead of her. She took a deep breath and threw a glare Jor – no, Cassian’s way.

“Well?” he said, the end of that word always sounding lovely in his accent. She remained silent, “you know him?”

She huffed, “yes. No. Not really.”

His eyes grew large as saucers, “what do you mean?”

“I knew him, a long time ago.”

“Do you think he recognized you?”

“No, because at the time, I was four years old. He may find me familiar, but he won’t be able to place me.”

She watched his face for any reaction on this information about her childhood – the fact that at some point in her life, whatever adults were around her were in contact with at least one Imperial officer, but as always, he didn’t let anything on.

It had almost immediately hurt, seeing the expanse of white in the man’s uniform. At first she thought that was all it was: a reminder of her parents’ best friend at the time of her childhood here on Coruscant. But then the man had smiled, charmingly, and she remembered: the long nights where she was supposed to be in bed and that man and her father would be at it; either drinking or working over their condo’s dining table. She was too young to know what they talked about, but those hands – the hands that were now cutting into a cake that she had half-assed baked before going to help Cassian kidnap a man – had once made a habit of ruffling her braided hair, always asking her condescending questions about her toys. She always thought he was nice, until she understood, at mere six years old, that he was one of the reasons her parents suddenly decided to become farmers on Lah'mu of all places. What followed, her blindly obeying as her parents told her to run and hide because someone had come for them and their never coming back, she always attributed, in part, to that man. She was never sure if he was the one that had arrived on Lah'mu that day, but for years she had pretended she aimed her pistols at his head during target practice as she grew into the most efficient fighter in Saw Gerrera’s cadre.

“Alright,” Cassian sighed, seemingly satisfied, “we’ll have dinner with him sometime this week; let me befriend him, evidently.”

“Evidently,” she simpered back at him, pushing down the urge to break down and tell him everything.

“Are you still mad at me about before?”

She was nowhere in the frame of mind to have _that_ discussion.

“Don’t we have something in our ship that we have to take care of?”

He closed his eyes, his stance softening a bit.

“Yes. By the way, I told him that if he didn’t shut up, I’d set you loose on him. Then I knocked him out.”

At this, she found herself smiling at him. “You know, _Cassian_ , the Alliance doesn’t give you credit enough.”

“Tell me about it,” he grumbled, gesturing for her to exit their bedroom.

 

**

 

She stood at the man’s back, as Cassian dragged him forward and pulled at his gag. Pop music conveniently came out from the ship’s cockpit and Kestrel allowed herself to sway a bit to it, truncheon in her hand. It wasn’t like she liked these sorts of situations, but she figured that moving even if a little was better than bottling up her nervousness when she didn’t actually need to. Cassian, on the other hand, was all high-strung and sharp movements, his face not conveying the barest emotion. As the man spat and coughed from being gagged too long, he cracked his knuckles.

“Well, are you going to tell us what sort of information you’ve been selling the Empire?”

“It was nothing important. Nothing as important as the intel I said I could give you, if only you’d believe me.”

At the sound of his voice, Kestrel’s stomach lurched. At one point, this day was going to have to end, otherwise she was sure she was going to end up with her cover blown. Of all the shady partisans that could be selling them out, did it really have to be Tivik? She considered staying quiet for the remainder of their little interview. Another person from her past emerging so soon – well, almost immediately, she admitted – was surely bound to make Cassian have a fit. Or actually kill her. However, Tivik wasn’t meant to walk out of their hangar. And he knew as much about her as Cassian did, only under a different name. The fact that she could hold something over him was bound to be useful.

“What sort of banthashit has he been feeding you?” she asked, making sure her voice carried as clearly as possible.

Tivik turned around, aghast, and started stammering as soon as he saw her, “Lianna?”

Since the man had his head turned in her direction, Cassian didn’t stop himself from giving her an exasperated look as if to say _“really?_ ”. As her reply, she only shrugged her shoulders, before aiming a kick at Tivik’s left shin.

“You’re Alliance now?” he dared ask after bending down with a whoomph.

“That’s none of your business, you piece of shit,” she spat, “answer my partner’s question.”

Tivik started babbling to Cassian, about a weapon that could blow entire planets to smithereens, and she tried to pay attention, but a sharp, metallic taste filled her mouth as she – against her best efforts – remembered the feeling of that man’s body against hers as he pinned her down in one of the many secluded tunnels in Saw’s headquarters on Ord Mantell. He hadn’t managed to get from her what he wanted; her reputation as Saw’s most fearless fighter wasn’t for anything, as she made it very clear to him, by managing to get one of her hands loose and just grabbing whatever she could of his groin and pulling, elbowing him in the gut when he gave her enough room as he jerked back. She finally understood, though, what it was that Maia, the girl that bunked with her, was crying about in her sleep after having incinerated her own clothes for no apparent reason. She had told Saw and her adoptive father had told the man to run before he regretted not killing him. It was clear now that Tivik was scum for more than one very solid reason.

When Kestrel finally focused back on his pleading with Cassian, he was talking about a cargo pilot that could back his intel up. Someone that had tried to contact Saw’s people and that due to faulty intel, had ended up looking him up on the Rings of Kafrene; a man named Rook.

“Even if I believe you,” Cassian said calmly, considering the man’s information, “that doesn’t negate the fact that you’ve been selling us out for some reason.”

“Survival is reason enough. Gerrera ran me off, because _someone_ here made some nonsense up.”

Cassian turned to look at her, but she didn’t even register it as she suddenly saw red. In seconds, she had Tivik slammed against the wall of their ship, her truncheon closing off his larynx.

“ _Nonsense_? You call that _nonsense_? I know that you did the same thing to Maia and by what I saw of her, she wasn’t as quick or as strong or as _lucky_ as me. Who knows how many others you didn’t put your filthy hands on, not to mention other stuff.”

Cassian’s eyes were taking up most his face by this point, his nostrils flaring, probably jumping to all the right conclusions. Tivik squirmed against her and unless she landed a knee into him pretty soon, she wasn’t going to able to hold on much longer, with their size difference. Instead, though, she swiped at his feet and sent him to the floor with a large thud, aiming a boot right in his solar plexus for good measure. He didn’t black out, though, just raggedly breathed on the floor, as he coughed some more.

“Tell us what you’ve passed along to the Empire,” she demanded, her own breath labored.

“Don’t worry, _Lianna_ , or whatever you’re calling yourself these days, I didn’t sell _you_ out.”

“What the kriff is that supposed to mean?” she had a foot halfway lifted, aimed at his kidney.

The man eyed Cassian, for some reason, and it was like the floor was ripped from under her feet. And then almost every word she feared hearing started coming out of Tivik’s disgusting mouth. Almost.

“I figured out who you really are. Others in Saw’s band were pretty close to doing so, too. Wonder why he was so happy to hand you off to the Alliance, despite thinking they were a bunch of wimps?”

She ignored Cassian more for her own comfort than for Tivik’s benefit.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He didn’t break eye contact with her, “don’t I?”

“What sort of intel did you sell the Imps?” she demanded, one more time.

Tivik ignored her, “wonder if your _partner_ here knows who you really are, J-“

The man didn’t get to finish his sentence. He keeled over with a blaster burn in the back of his head. For a second, Kestrel believed that she had shot him herself, except that the only weapon she had in her hand was her truncheon. Cassian, rather, stood next to her with the smell of blaster fire emanating from him. She was momentarily stunned, but soon turned wide eyes onto her husband. Tivik hadn’t admitted to anything in particular, the bastard. Cassian shouldn’t have just up and shot him.

“What-“

“The man could blow your cover. Right now that’s more important than whatever he could have told the Empire. And honestly, I don’t think he might have compromised the Rebellion a whole lot. It seems his contacts right now are mostly fortuitous.”

She shook her head in order to realign her thoughts and watched Cassian as he pulled some tarp from a box in the ship’s hold. He hadn’t cared to know her real identity. They were always going to “handle” Tivik in the end, so shooting him could wait. Another demonstration of trust, she figured, biting her lower lip.

Kestrel sometimes felt that Joreth had been attracted to her since their first meeting in the Mon Calamari cruiser she was brought into after two years’ training in Dantooine. But it was only a slight feeling and most times she always ended up thinking that she was imagining things. He always showed himself wary of her. He questioned her methods, her priorities; he was a stickler for procedure and for following even the most asinine of rules. That was extended to their own relationship. Kestrel had never forfeited herself from having sex just for the sake of it and Joreth was obviously attractive. At times, when he was out of his Imperial uniform, and had the sleeves of a soft shirt rolled up his forearms as he cooked, she found him ridiculously so. And thus from the minute she figured that she couldn’t stew in her anger for the entirety of an operation that might take years to be shut down, she decided that if he showed any inclination towards taking advantage of their married status, she would gladly be up for it. But that had never happened. What was even more baffling, though she suspected that it might help explain it, was that Joreth had no apparent problems having sex for the sake of the mission. Both were trained specifically to resort to _any_ methods in recruiting sources and somewhere around the close of their first year together, she started to figure out to what his assignments had entailed based on his demeanor when he got home. On the long list of things concerning their job Joreth had seemingly started to gradually grow bitter about, having sex with strangers wasn’t even among the top ones.

Not having sex with her didn’t mean that Joreth wasn’t affectionate or hadn’t, in last few months, started to want to be more open to her, something that occasionally rankled her, like it had that same morning. At the beginning of their arrangement, it was tacitly established that they would only act as husband and wife for an audience’s benefit. So she would drape herself on his arm at social functions held at the Imperial Academy, where he had a supervising post since they first arrived in Coruscant; similarly, he would laugh with her colleagues, sometimes even at her expense, at work parties. But none of that “pretending-we’re-married-shtick” had ever happened at home, until recently. She couldn’t pin point the exact cause or the catalyst for such a change, but she hadn’t developed yet the nerve to ask him. So she hid behind her usual brashness and her long silences and hoped that she could figure out what was going on in his head before anything went to hell.

She bent to help him with Tivik’s body, the extra weight of death finally setting in. They wrapped the dead man on the tarp and without even looking at each other, went to the cockpit to go on another trip.

He was quiet at the controls, lifting off while she still got settled, and other than a few glances in her direction, he didn’t seem like he was going to address what had just happened any time soon. She was thankful for the silence; it gave her an opportunity to contemplate what a close call she had come across, to grieve once again for Maia and all other girls who had lost huge chunks of their faith to men like Tivik, to be silently grateful for her partner. That made her realize that for the first time since she was partnered with the man Alliance called Joreth Sward, she hadn’t expected him to turn his blaster on her at the first sign of trouble.

She put her hand out from where it had been on the co-pilot seat’s armrest and touched Cassian’s jacket sleeve. He turned to look at her and while she saw a great deal of what seemed contrition in his eyes, she detected a deep sadness behind it and something that looked almost apologetic. She pursed her lips and nodded at him, trying to convey that she was fine with what he had done (and deep down, she was).

After they dumped Tivik’s body in Coruscant’s teeming underworld and flew back home, she went to the kitchen to heat them a couple of meal packs. Cassian gathered their weapons and went back to the bedroom. When he came back, in about ten standard minutes, she was putting the packs on plates so they could better pretend these were actual meals, and he was showered, smelling like he had just dumped his entire bottle of shampoo on his body. He turned on the holonews. Loud.

“I’m not going to report on everything that happened tonight,” he said, picking at his food like he had no intention of eating it.

She blinked at him. Cassian’s reports were usually very through and when she slacked off, he more often than not scolded her, like what she imagined would be a school master.

“Thanks,” she said, munching and staring down at her plate.

“I know we’re supposed to put the mission and the Rebellion first. And I don’t doubt that if it came to it, we’d both sacrifice ourselves to let the other succeed. But you have to know you can trust me. We need to have each other’s backs. If you can’t trust me…”

“If I can’t trust you, you can’t trust me. Like I said, it goes both ways.”

“Exactly. So I don’t care. I don’t care who that man was and how exactly you knew him, but I do care about what he did to you. I do care that he would put you in danger.”

She didn’t know what to say, so she just nodded in response. He went on.

“I also could care less about how at four years old you were familiar with an Imperial officer.”

Her hand froze with her fork on the way to her mouth.

“Maybe you should care”, she replied, “wouldn’t it be useful?”

“By what I gathered from you so far, that would not even be callous; it would actually be useless.”

“I thought that the cause was your priority?”

“It is, but I’m tired of hurting innocent people.”

“I’m ‘innocent people’ now?” She had no idea where he was going with this.

He actually laughed. “Not really, by your rap sheet, but I wouldn’t use any aspects of your life just because it _might_ be convenient to the Alliance’s purposes. If you actually knew who Orson Krennic was, I’m pretty sure that you would have mentioned something by now. You didn’t. People have pasts. The rebellion is packed with Imperial defectors. I’m not going to hold anything over your head, Kestrel.”

“You don’t think _I_ might be Imperial?”

“I’m not stupid, so no.”

She felt something pin prick behind her eyes, but managed to force her feelings down and just nod at Cassian, while he wolfed down what was on his plate. She didn’t know what she had done to deserve all this leniency and understanding.

After she had showered, she slid into bed next to him. He was lying on his side, turned towards her pillow, half his face hidden underneath the covers. It had taken a long time for her to get used to fully relaxing as she slept next to someone. However, for the purposes of this mission, they couldn’t look like soldiers or guerrilla fighters running on caff and whatever little sleep that could be gotten with an eye open. The bed was big enough for them not to touch each other in sleep and she grew used to his patterns, his breathing, and the habit he had of hunkering under their blankets. For the second time that day, she found her hand reaching out to voluntarily touch him without anyone else watching. He peeked at her with only one eye open. She felt the corners of her mouth rise in a small smile.

“Sometimes I wonder how you breathe, sleeping like that.”

He shoved the blanket and sheets down until his chin was uncovered, blinking at her sleepily.

“My home planet,” he began and continued after she had arranged herself to lie facing him, “was ice cold and for most of my life I didn’t have this many stuff to cover myself with.”

For a while, she was almost stupefied that the uptight Alliance officer behind Joreth Sward would allow himself to bask in the little luxuries this mission afforded them. She decided that vague details about her time with Saw weren’t anything different from what he might know about her already, especially after tonight.

“The only time I had anything remotely resembling this was when… I might have run into our neighbor,” she replied, “then… well, shit happened, and I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t sharing some sleazy bunk with other girls fighting with Saw’s people.”

Even though they were at their usual distance from each other, facing him like this made her swear she could feel his breath on her cheeks.

“A shame we have to share a bed, then,” he said.

She found herself actually smiling at him. And then decided that if he was making this much effort to show that he trusted her, she also could also return the favor, however bad she might be at such things.

“Jyn,” she said, quietly, and she was surprised it didn’t sound weird on her tongue after so many years of disuse, “my real name’s Jyn.”

He only half-smiled and yawned.

“Goodnight, Jyn.”

“Goodnight, Cassian.”

 


	3. Thousand-yard stare

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm supposed to be writing an academic article, but when I sit down, all that comes out is this.
> 
> Thanks for the kudos and comments. You're all very sweet.

His hand fell at the side of her shoulder furthest from him, his arm casually draped behind her head on the sofa. She was wearing a deep blue dress, layered with a green cloak, the upturned collar of which his sleeve was rubbing against. She held a drink in her hand, legs crossed at the knees, like she belonged in Orson Krennic’s living room. It should have bothered him; it should have made all sorts of alarms ring in his head. Instead, all he got from looking at her that night was a quiet sort of assurance, as, despite her playing at being relaxed and tipsy, she watched their host like a hawk. He knew Draven would be pulling all sorts of plugs in their operation if he knew even half of what had happened two nights before, but he trusted his gut instinct, the one that told him that the man mixing drinks for him had absolutely no idea who the woman sitting on his living room sofa and laughing at his jokes was. It also made no sense for Jyn to be a double agent. If she was, he bet a large quantity of the credits the Alliance owed him that this run-in with the Imperial engineer would not have happened.

One thing that always got to him about his wife in these situations was how loudly she actually spoke. How the vowels just tumbled out of her mouth in a way that never did across the breakfast table from him. Kestrel Sward, née Dawn, was an outgoing young woman, always ready to laugh. Jyn, as he now knew her to be called, was an introvert, always sitting quietly somewhere in their apartment, with millions of things he had no inkling about running in her head as she played with a necklace or stirred a cup of red tea. He figured he liked both women, because being undercover never meant erasing completely one’s self. Somewhere, behind those green eyes that he occasionally caught looking at him before he really woke up, was a woman who was as carefree with her joy as Kestrel Sward was.

He was fairly certain she was equally bemused by his manner around his supposed colleagues, though. It wasn’t like he wasn’t laughing at what Krennic was saying while he served them sophisticated cocktails.

The man seemed disinclined to talk about work, something that he immediately filed away. After they were done eating – Kestrel had suggested they order Alderaanian –, Krennic leaned back on his chair and seemed to appraise them.

“It’s been a while since I’ve had such pleasant company. You both remind me of my university friends.”

Kestrel smiled, the corners of her lips painfully stretching in what he knew wasn’t genuine mirth at all, "we’re glad to be of service.”

“So you’ve recently moved to Imperial Center. Where were you stationed before?”

“Oh, here and there. Eadu, mostly,” Krennic shrugged, “horrible place.”

“But you’ve lived here before.”

“Yes, yes. I was overseeing some projects. Now they’re almost finished, really, so I need to be here to deal with the bureaucracy.”

This was Kestrel’s cue to moan and start complaining about her woes with Imperial red tape, which she made sure she said she knew was a remnant of the Old Republic. She smiled sweetly at Krennic, lacing her fingers through Joreth’s on the tabletop, and turned on the girlish act he hardly could believe the first time he had seen it.

“What have you been building? Can you tell us? Joreth and I can keep a secret. Can’t we, darling?”

“Don’t bother the man, Kestrel,” he fondly admonished.

Krennic seemed to brim with something prideful, laughed, looked sideways at the table for a second, as if considering something.

“I would rather you be surprised when we finally unveil it.”

Kestrel all but jumped in her chair, squeezed his fingers in her hand. “Oooh, there’ll be an _unveiling_!”

Krennic seemed amused at her enthusiasm, “of a sort, yes.”

“Well, then,” she said, “we won’t want the surprise ruined, though I suppose that it’s the sort of thing that if you told us, you’d have to kill us.”

The older man laughed, “something like that.”

Kestrel actually giggled. _For Force’s sake._

 

**

 

She was tugging off her sheer stockings, sitting on the edge of the bed as he made his transmissions from their walk-in closet, her hair tumbling out of the elaborate do she had pinned it up in.

She was muttering to herself, “some sort of unveiling.”

“Don’t suppose it’s a shopping venue,” he mumbled back, tapping out the codes.

“You didn’t believe Tivik,” she pondered, “but what if there was something to it?”

He finished what he was doing and started pulling at his own clothes. She had wandered into the bathroom and after he was done changing for sleep, suddenly there she was, the actual curmudgeon the Alliance had assigned as his wife.

She laid on top of the covers for a while, her bare legs bent at the knees, small pale feet tensing up on the comforter. He remembered the kick she had aimed at Tivik two nights ago - the satisfaction from seeing her get back at that man for what he had done to her eating a little at his heart - and found himself smiling at such a nimble, delicate thing almost finishing off a man.

“What?” she asked, hackles up like he was used to.

“You have really tiny feet.”

“You have very large ears.”

“Better to hear things with,” he mumbled in reply.

“So. You heard Tivik.”

“I don’t know what’s more improbable: a super weapon that could destroy entire planets or an Imperial officer teasing his new neighbors about it over dinner.”

She was silent for a while, thinking.

“Unless you know something I don’t,” he said, carefully.

She turned to look at him, but he couldn’t quite make out any emotion across her face. She was good at this, almost as good as him. Had she gone through the same amount of training and missions as him, she would have him beat at this game from the start.

“I told you I don’t know who he actually is” she whispered – they were both lying down now, staring at the ceiling, “he was around a lot, that’s it. I was too small.”

“My parents are dead,” he said, out of the blue.

“So are mine,” she replied and then turned on her side to face him, sighing impatiently, “you don’t need to do this.”

He stayed like he was, pretending the pattern around the lamp over their bed was fascinating. The sheets rustled as she got under them and he automatically followed suit, feeling the cold of her feet radiating under the covers. Were this a normal marriage, he would be complaining about her tucking them against his legs, he figured. But he just looked at her warily instead; her feet were nowhere near his.

“Do what?”

“Tell me things, even if vaguely. I’m not a recruit.”

“I know.”

“Well, then.”

“Your parents knew him.”

He turned to look at her. Her eyes were closed, “yes.”

“Where?”

“Here.”

“Then what happened?”

“They died.”

Not a lie, he felt, but she was omitting a good deal. He could tell by the way she inhaled a little stronger than usual before speaking, a hair’s breadth of more air in her lungs.

“You think we should look into what Tivik was talking about.”

She opened her eyes again, scooted a bit closer to him. He didn’t know if she realized she did it.

“He said there was someone who could back his claim. It wouldn’t cost us much to check it out.”

“Rook.”

“Yes.”

“We find him the usual way, I suppose.”

“He might be here for all we know. If Tivik wasn’t bluffing, this guy’s looking for him.”

“Alright, I’ll get to it tomorrow.”

Her eyes dropped shut, but she didn’t move away from him, and with his head filled with new information to categorize, that surprisingly didn’t come to his notice until he settled himself to fall asleep. She breathed out of her mouth and wisps of her hair tickled his face. He was tempted to draw back, he _should_ draw back a little, give her a little room for when she woke up, but he put out a hand towards her face, tucked her bangs behind her eyes. He saw her eyelids flicker and for a second he thought she might punch him, but she buried her head further into the pillow, the closed fist she had next to her face, between them, gradually relaxing.

Before he did anything stupid, he turned around and tried to sleep.

 

*

 

The following morning, Cassian dropped Jyn off at the office, but like many times before, didn’t head to the Academy. He had called in sick, as he was bound to do from time to time, as a veteran from campaigns on the Unknown Regions. He made a detour a few thousand levels down to the private hangar the Alliance had rented for them when they first arrived. There, he took the necessary precautions to ensure no one would recognize him and exchanged their ship for a smaller one. Then he flew further away, into the area of Imperial Center better known as the Works.

The night before, he had established a transmission riding of the back of Imperial communications to a contact he had in the Imperial Port Authority, setting up a meeting in the most ordinary of diners he could think of. There he sat, with the bulk of his rough clothing concealing a blaster on safety, two vibroblades tucked elsewhere. The man, though, a Rodian that Cassian found reliable enough, was late. Zayz, as he was called, was never late. Cassian knew him to be anxious and tardiness wasn’t a trace of his personality.

Something was obviously wrong.

He was ready to stop pretending he was paying attention to the bad programming on the HoloNet in the screen above his table and just up and leave when Zayz stormed into the diner with no semblance of discretion, looking harried and tense all the way to his toes.

“Sorry, sorry,” he mumbled, as he grabbed a cup of caff and sat down with Cassian.

“Let’s take a walk,” Cassian said instead, “I don’t feel like eating anything, after all.”

The Rodian seemed to gulp, probably sensing that he was aware something was up. He set their pace at a somewhat leisurely stroll and raised his fake blond eyebrows at the humanoid.

“I don’t think I can do this anymore,” the Rodian started, “things have been tight at work.”

“What does that mean exactly?”

“I found out a colleague of mine was an informer. Another Rodian. He had a family and everyone’s got to eat, right? So he was selling people out. Keeping an eye on them.”

“Were you friends with him?”

“Sort of.”

“Did he ever ask you anything that you could say sounded suspicious?”

“I don’t know.”

He rolled his eyes. The man was breathing heavily and Cassian tried to smother down the instinct to shake the unease out of him. This was the sort of thing that after a while should have stopped happening in his career. He figured that at some point he was going to pick better contacts or become a better recruiter. However, the truth was that, while Cassian wasn’t in direct contact with the Alliance in over three years, he could feel that things weren’t as stable as they were at the time they first settled on Yavin IV. Sources had been hard to come by as of late. Jyn didn’t say as much, but sometimes she would arrive home brimming with impatience, her footsteps just a little bit heavier as trudged to their bedroom.

The Rodian shoved a datacard into his hand.

“I got you what you wanted. Your man’s name’s on there. But don’t call me again. At least for a while.”

“As far as I understand, we’ve been keeping the payments coming, haven’t we?”

“Y-yes, but if it means going to some prison camp or being tortured or executed, I don’t think your money’s going to be of much use.”

“We can get you out if you feel you’re in danger.”

“And live on the run until…?”

“Until the war’s over, you mean? Not on the run, no, we’d get you a new life. On the Outer Rim, but somewhere nice. You wouldn’t be bothered. Not by us, either. Your services have been appreciated.”

“No, no, that’s no way to live,” Zayz could barely keep the despair from his large eyes.

Cassian could feel the part of his brain conditioned by his training start gearing up to what he would eventually have to do, against his better nature. He ran a hand over his blond whiskers and as a Twilek woman glided past them, went along with his cover’s personality and looked at her retreating back. While Zayz was equally distracted, he reached behind him and set his blaster on kill mode. Then he saw an alley and walked into it, hoping to talk some sense into Zayz without having the confrontation out in public.

Zayz started sputtering then, breathing even more heavily, mucus running from his nostrils.

“I could give you some time to feel comfortable again, Zayz. You don’t have to do anything rash.”

Zayz lowered his voice. “There have been a couple of defections lately. The fact that Alliance’s been taking hit after hit lately hasn’t stopped people from being stupid, I think. We’re being watched more carefully. I can’t go on like this.”

Cassian hated himself for it, but said it anyway. “We can get you more credits.”

“To hell with your credits,” and at this, the Rodian pulled a blaster and Cassian momentarily closed his eyes in impatience.

He put his hands up and heard his own voice come out of his mouth almost with bored serenity.

“There’s no need to shoot me. Only thing you’re going to get shooting me is a holo of you doing it and that’s no good, right?” He pointed upwards to the street security camera.

For a brief second, Zayz seemed to weight his options, but his fingers tightened on the blaster.

“I don’t care! Just leave me the hell alone!”

“Alright,” Cassian said, reaching with his hand over his back, “everything’s going to be alright. I just need to get you a chip with the contact of a friend, who will help you out if you need anything.”

“Stop moving,” Zayz said, “I’ll shoot you, I swear.”

And then he fell over, the blaster bolt hitting him right in the middle of his huge eyes. Cassian felt his hands shaking in a way they hadn’t in a long time. He searched Zayz and found nothing relevant, then simply walked casually as far as he could from the alley.

 

*

 

When Jyn finally got home, he was still in the same place he had been the second he arrived, slumped on the floor of their apartment’s foyer. He had got rid of the whig, whiskers, eyebrows and clothes that made up Eron Cheveal, the mechanic Zayz had befriended at a spaceport cantina. That man was as dead as Zayz was. Her green eyes widened in concern when she saw him and she dropped her bag and jacket on the entryway table before crouching in front of him. She fumbled with a few buttons next to the door and the HoloNet started blaring nonsense in their living room.

“What happened?”

He swallowed. He had planned on getting over himself before she got home, but must have lost track of time. He didn’t answer her, but couldn’t get himself to move, either. Instead, he picked into his pocket and found the datacard Zayz had given him.

“It’s here. He’s here. Or was. Apparently.”

“Rook?”

“Yes.”

She sat in front of him, the bracelets she wore as Kestrel Sward, the transport logistics expert, clattering as she perched her elbows over her knees.

“That’s not good news?”

“It is, but I had to deal with Zayz.”

“Oh.”

“Apparently, Empire’s been cracking down on their employees. A friend of his turned out to be an informer.”

“Did you tell him he had options?” She asked gingerly.

“Yes,” he slammed his head against the wall, “I must have sounded like a kriffing travel agent.”

“And?”

“He pointed a blaster at me.”

Her lips turned down further, her eyebrows furrowed.

“ _Oh._ ”

“It’s the fourth being I kill in less than a standard week.”

She reached out, took his hands. His were cold and hers were warm, probably from being tucked in her pockets in the transport home. Despite himself, he rubbed her fingers with his, looked at her from under his fringe and waited for her to speak.

“You can take a time-out. I’ll go meet Rook, see if he’s lonely and in need of a friend to chat.”

“Tomorrow, though.”

“Yeah, okay. But if the Imps are tightening security on personnel level and this pans out, I’m going to need you to-“

“Don’t worry, I’ll get over my shit.”

She shook her head, a wry smile on her lips.

“Darling, you’re only human. Rumor had it you didn’t have a heart.”

He snorted, a humorless thing, and she got up and offered him a hand. He took it, let her propel him forward and allowed himself to pass his arm around her shoulders as they went to the living room, just for a bit.


	4. Rook

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for all the kind comments and kudos. It's lovely to know you're liking this. :)
> 
> So here we meet out favorite cargo pilot. Let me know what you think!

So this was how Jyn got an inkling of what was going on with Cassian; she got home from work and found him slumped on the floor, head down, apparently having been there for Force knew how long. She had seen fighters like this when she was running with Saw’s partisans; men who seemed to hold themselves together with duratape after years of too many encounters with certain death and way too much killing for a cause. She never would have guessed it, from the way he had acted from the beginning of their arrangement, but then, she supposed, everyone had their limits.

After leaving him on the living room couch and changing into comfortable clothes, she thawed a stew he had cooked a few weeks back, figuring he would want something warm and comforting to eat. She was not good at dealing with people. At Saw’s they were trained not to get too close, because all that mattered was the cause and attachments could be cumbersome. She had developed certain camaraderie with a few girls, even if distant; she was safeguarding her identity even as she had first arrived on Ord Mantell with Saw after her parents had left her. Since joining the Alliance, she had seen that they were more permissive with relationships; the rebels there were friends, sometimes lovers, even married. She had never opened up, however, from sheer force of habit and because of who her parents were. She was better at simply doing things: giving someone her extra blanket; sharing food and drink; having their backs in dire situations. Jyn always felt incompetent when it came to words.

She set a bowl of the stew and a spoon on the center table in their living room, settling on an armchair with a portion of her own on her lap. Cassian was still lying on his back on the couch, legs thrown over the armrest, eyes closed. He turned to look at what she had offered and gruffly sat up.

“You didn’t need to.”

“No, I wanted to.”

He settled to eat, slightly glowering at her, for some reason. She tried to ignore it, paying attention to the news instead. Cassian may be a pain in the ass, at times, with his constantly doubting her and questioning her every move, but one thing she had to admit to was that she enjoyed his cooking. From the time she was eight, she had been living on rations, protein cubes and tasteless nutrition bars, and she knew first-hand that the Alliance’s kitchens weren’t very different. Playing house in Coruscant on a long-term intelligence-gathering mission gave them a pretext for eating real food. At first, she was eager to spend their credits on restaurants, something he had always reacted strongly against. He started bringing food home from the markets in the city, which carried items from the entire Galaxy, and she would scoff at first, saying that she wasn’t one for cooking. But then she would come home to different smells and Joreth bent over some recipe from a datapad, his eyebrows crumpling together over something trivial for a change. Their kitchen would be brimming with fruits and vegetables she had never seen before. Jyn had to admit she enjoyed this, despite everything, despite herself. And she could tell the differences in her own body after three years of constantly eating real food; nails that didn’t chip so easily, better attention span, the precious feeling of satiety. It occurred to her that she had never shown gratitude for that.

She squirmed a bit in the armchair, left her own spoon stuck in the stew.

“You want to talk about it?”

The look he gave her was mostly of stupefaction, but also a bit indignant.

“I’m not asking to be coddled.”

“I’m not saying you are.”

He remained quiet.

“Fine, then,” she said, and resumed eating.

He turned to his food in silence as well.

“It’s okay to be tired of this,” she found herself mumbling.

“You aren’t.”

“Says who?”

“You don’t understand.”

“Try me.”

Something seemed to snap in him and he lost any semblance of calm. He shoved the bowl back on the table and glared at her.

“I’ve been doing this since was I six years old.”

“So what? I was eight.”

“What?”

“I was eight when Saw picked me up. Don’t act like you didn’t read the file Draven had on me. You know I’ve seen and done just as many horrible things as you have.”

“Well, congratulations on not having a conscience.”

By this point, she felt she could punch him in the face.

“You may have read my files, but you don’t know shit about me, _Joreth_.”

She got up and went to leave her half-eaten bowl of food on the sink. A terrible waste, protested the part of her brain that was ruled by her stomach, but her pride won out.

Getting down to business was probably a better idea, so she figured she would try to make contact with their handlers to solicit help in tracking down Bodhi Rook in Imperial Center. If they had a narrow time frame to do this, they were never going to achieve it alone. She had a vague idea of what sort of cover would go in handy to talk to a pilot who seemed about to defect from the Empire and sat down on the vanity in the bedroom to better get a grip on that person.

She was busy contemplating her options when Cassian appeared on the threshold of their bedroom door, looking surprisingly contrite.

“Sorry about that.”

She just glared at him.

“I don’t know what’s happening to me.”

“I told you. You’re only human.”

“I suppose.”

“I was trying to help. I know I’m not particularly nice to be around. I’ve been alone most of my life, even when I was with Saw. I just figured… I honestly don’t know how we haven’t killed each other yet.”

“Other things to worry about, I suppose.”

“That and you cook really well,” she said, venturing a small smile in his direction.

His lips did that thing where they upturned without him actually smiling at her. She felt strangely relieved.

 

**

 

Bodhi Rook was more than a fairly decent sabacc player. So much that he was giving Kaya Mandur a run for her money. Every time she had to hand over her chips to him, she would blow a strand of her pink bangs out of her eyes in a show of slight annoyance. He, in turn, would let his large brown eyes fill with a sort of childish joy, a little bit fueled by the awful orange cocktails that he kept ordering to their table and that Kaya kept drinking despite herself.

The bar they were at wasn’t really a bar; it was mixture of gaming venue, prostitution den and cocktail joint; the sort of haunt to attract pilots from across the galaxy looking to kill time in between trips. She had groaned at the cliché when she learned that the Jedhan cargo pilot she was supposed to meet had been seen there a handful of times, but was slightly relieved that he seemed to enjoy the gambling more than the socializing. For Kaya Mandur, a freighter pilot who spoke with a cocksure Corellian accent but only to those that she deemed worth her time, he seemed like ideal company. She had seen him in a quiet corner, where the bass from the dance music playing up front was only a slightly accompaniment, shuffling a deck of cards and waiting for anyone to join him. She had slipped in the seat across from him with a defiant little smile and ordered whatever from a Twilek waitress whatever he was having.

“This is really awful,” she said for the umpteenth time in the evening, smacking her lips after finishing another glass and restacking their cards to deal them another game.

“Why do you keep drinking it, then?”

“You keep ordering them.”

“You keep drinking them!”

They laughed at their own nonsense, Kaya dealing them another game, cards slipping from her svelte ringed fingers. Rook had asked why he had never seen her at there before and she said that she had just recently picked up her most recent line of work as a freight pilot. Before that, she had piloted tourist barges in Coronet and after splitting from her husband, had found an itinerant life more to her liking. Rook seemed to enjoy her company; her deadpan humor, her willingness to lose money to him, the fact that she was one of the few women at the bar they were at who didn’t look like she might expect something out of him. They had been consistently playing for three hours now and they fell into easy banter. Kaya was supposed to be standoffish, but Rook’s unexpected brand of humor seemed to unravel something in her.

She kept tinkling her long green fingernails on the credit chips that Rook hadn’t won out of her yet. There was one issue, though, with their easy camaraderie: Rook hadn’t opened up yet. She had told him all sorts of crazy stories from her time in Corellia, but he offered little in return. She figured it was because he was young or because he felt she could make out the Imperial insignia in his pilot jacket. But then, this was the sort of spaceport joint in Imperial Center where affiliations were never an issue: pilots had to survive one way or another, either by joining the Empire or by keeping their heads down. Kaya was the second sort and she wasn’t one to begrudge Rook being the first.

She threw her arms over head to stretch after their latest game ended, her synthleather piloting jacket tugging at her shoulders. He shuffled the cards with the expertise of someone who was too used to killing time.

“You flying out any time soon?” He asked, eyes on the deck of cards in his hand. She almost couldn’t believe she finally had her opening.

“No, not for a few days. You?”

“Not until the day after tomorrow. I’m waiting for a few supplies.”

“Where are you staying?”

“An inn a few blocks down. Nothing too shabby.”

“Good. I’d offer you a place to crash, but the apartment I rent when I’m out here is way too cramped.”

“Thanks,” he said, with a warm smile, which she mentally jotted down as a sign that he was beginning to trust her.

He made to deal again, but she put out a hand.

“I’m done playing for tonight. You’ve taken way too many credits from me and I really need to go home. Order one of these disgusting things we’ve been drinking for the road, though, will you? I’ll go, you know, powder my nose.”

Jyn was relieved that he didn’t follow her. Rook seemed, so far, a decent sort, if too closed up. It was the first time she had genuine fun while out with a source, which was worrisome, but beat being afraid all the time. She checked herself in the mirror, her pink hair giving off a halo around her face that brought out the bluish veins on her forehead. Despite the cocktails being awful, she wasn’t anywhere near drunk, but she splashed some water on her face anyway, careful not to smudge her make up.

By the time she arrived back on the table, Bodhi was nursing another one of the orange Mandalorian cordial based drink. She settled in her chair and spun the straw between her fingers in her own glass. Before she could speak, though, he leaned casually on the table, hand skimming the arm she had rested across from him. He tried to make his question casual.

“You’re Alliance?”

She inwardly smiled, oddly proud of him for figuring her out, impressed a bit that he was making this look like he was finally putting his moves on her.

“I’m not at liberty to say what I am exactly, but yes, you could say I’m one of those people that aren’t fond of the Empire…”

“If I… choose to do this…,” he seemed nervous, despite his early assuredness, “will you always be the one meeting me?”

“Yes,” she licked her lips, better to look like she was flirting back, running a fingernail over the sleeve of his jacket, “I’ll set up a way for you to get in contact with me when you want to meet. It’s nothing complicated.”

He leaned back, smiled, fiddled a bit with the end of his ponytail.

“All right, Kaya. Here’s where I’m staying,” he put a flimsy in her hand. “You – Can you leave directions there or are we playing more sabacc?”

“I can leave directions there,” she nodded carefully, looking down at her lap in fake bashfulness.

He nodded at her, taking a pull of his cocktail.

“You really like these, don’t you?” She mused, finishing hers in one dreadful gulp.

“I get a lot of slack from my buddies, but yeah, I like them,” he replied, a quiet laugh rumbling through him.

She got up, flicked her hair over her shoulder, and shot him a parting smile and a wink.

“See you around, Rook. Enjoy spending my credits.”

“Oh, I definitely will. See you, Kaya.”

For someone who had lost a shitload of credits, Kaya Mandur had an awfully cheerful sprint to her step as she flounced back to her ship.

 

**

 

The next morning, Jyn was thankful she didn’t have to go to work. Cassian only barely opened the curtains in their bedroom for her to feel pin pricks behind her eyes, pain like she had repeatedly banged her head against something hard building pressure on her brain. She let out a grunt, pulling the covers up around her face.

“You said you weren’t drunk when you got in last night.”

She opened her mouth to retort, but her tongue felt like she had slept munching on a sock. She hadn’t been drunk at all when she had stumbled back home as Kestrel Sward, back from a night out with her girlfriends, her make up slightly blurred, jangling a fancy handbag and huge earrings.

She made a face and heard Cassian’s contained laughter.

“Shut up.”

She felt rather than saw him leave the room and burrowed down to get more sleep, only to be shaken awake in what felt like seconds later, with him pressing a water bottle against the hand she had out from the pile of blankets.

  
“Rehydrate.”

Jyn felt like cursing at him, but mumbled something in gratitude instead, then sat up, her eyes still closed, and managed to wrench the bottle open and gulp down half of its contents without so much as taking a peek. The bed dipped on Cassian’s side and she painfully opened an eye; he was back in bed, a glass of juice in his hand and a datapad in his lap.

After she had finally acquired information on Rook’s likely whereabouts, they had slowly inched back to their usual brand of stilted familiarity. Cassian seemed to have pulled himself together, but she kept sharp eyes on him, which he seemed to notice but preferred not to comment on.

“What are you doing?”

She inwardly scoffed at herself for having sounded so alarmed. He blatantly ignored her.

“What did you have to drink last night?”

She made a face. “Rook kept ordering this awful cocktail with some kriffing sweet liqueur in it. It was like death from a straw.”

“And you kept drinking it.”

“I was trying to be nice!” She winced at the volume of her own voice.

“Well, apparently it worked?”

“He had me figured out. But yes, we’ve come to an agreement. Tivik wasn’t full of shit after all.”

He hummed in agreement.

“Draven would like him. He’s got a pretty good sabacc face.” She poked on his leg. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“Hm?”

“What are you doing?”

“Reading.”

“In bed.”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” she said, settling back into the pillows, “wake me up if you need me. Otherwise let me die a horrible death in peace, please.”

“I’m making you drink water soon again.”

“I’ll have to get up to pee.”

“Apparently, that’s how the human body works, yes.”

“I hate you.”

“I have nothing to do with the laserbrain choices you make while alone on the field, darling.”

Cassian seemed to regret it almost as soon as he said it, his eyes shutting as he put out a hand in her direction. She took his hand, laid it down on the pillow next to her and patted it condescendingly.

“Laserbrain choices that got you a source in Imperial personnel, sweetie.”

He looked relieved. “Fair enough.”

 

**

 

She was in the ‘fresher when she heard distant voices from the living room and the sound of bottles being opened in the kitchen. Her head felt a lot better, but now she was a bit nauseous and she felt a slight urge to kill Cassian for whatever shit he was getting up to while she felt so so miserable.

“Honey?” He called from what she could guess was the hallway leading to their quarters. “Orson’s here and we’re watching some smashball. Would you rather we went to his place?”

She closed her eyes, envisioning a free Galaxy for a brief second.

“It’s fine. Just… don’t yell at the HoloNet too much.”

He ran into the bedroom as she was settling in bed again and somewhat climbed onto bed on top of her, settling a kiss on her head, better to play the doting husband.

“Drink more water. And if you feel up to it, come out in a bit. He gets all – as you’d say it – _jolly_ , when you’re around.”

“Fine,” she mumbled, shoving him away, “fine.”


	5. La infanta

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, thank you so much for reading, commenting, leaving kudos. This is my first multichapter fic in forever, so every little piece of feedback is treasured. 
> 
> I should say that after reading Elizabeth (anghraine)'s "in tongues and quiet sighs", I adopted Alderaanian as space Spanish as my headcannon (hard not to when you're Latin-American). By the title of the chapter you can tell that this might affect Leia and Cassian's relationship just as it does in that story. 
> 
> Those who watch The Americans might recognize my attempt at introducing some new characters.
> 
> I know I'm taking forever to move this plot forward...

Aach was bored, picking flint off his light blue Alderaanian silk trousers as he sat in the senate office of one Bail Organa. The session in the Imperial Senate floor was about some inane legislation regarding escape pods in official vehicles. As a mere underlying aide, he was spared from having to accompany his senator in the proceedings, but he had to speak in person with his boss anyway, which meant waiting until the man deigned to leave the floor debate and move onto what Aach knew he would think was more pressing business.

He was checking his chrono for the eleventh time since he had sat down to wait in the spacious office when he heard the smarting of footsteps heading into the chamber and looked up to see a flash of white silk. He shot to his feet, suddenly relieved at the distraction.

“Aach!”

He was briefly taken aback. Despite the baby fat not having entirely left her features, the Princess of Alderaan seemed to have grown from the tightly wound adolescent he was assigned with aiding.

He wasn’t in the Empire’s capital a whole lot. His first job with the Organas had been as a page for their daughter, Princess Leia, back in their homeworld. The princess had been around fifteen then, and her parents had always been afraid of her growing up without the company of people her age; since Aach looked to be about five or six years her senior, he was seen as the best next thing for a job that included shadowing her in her first assignments as a political operative, still in Alderaan. They established a firm and honest rapport with each other, usually in their native Alderaanian; although, to Aach’s exasperation, the foundation to their friendship comprised with the princess testing Aach’s fastidiousness, formality and respect for protocol and hierarchy. When the time came for her to take over a Senate seat, he established himself as a courier between their senatorial offices in Imperial Center and their headquarters in Aldera. To say that the Organas, up to Queen Breha herself, considered Aach to be trustworthy was an understatement.

“ _Infanta,_ ” he said, formally bowing.

She smacked his arm and put a hand on his shoulder, better to leverage herself in order to stand on tiptoes and kiss his cheek, as was the custom in Alderaan between friends. This was the sort of thing he would have railed against back "home", but he found out her purpose when she took the opportunity to whisper “ _Básico_ ” in his ear.

“Waiting for Papá?” She asked good-naturedly, bouncing back on the soles of her feet.

“Yes, your highness,” he glared at her raised eyebrows, “I have news from home that we thought were better to delivered in person.”

“Ah, excellent,” she smiled, “you should come into my office later; I have some biscuits I know you’ll enjoy.”

“Do you think your father will be long in there?”

She tilted her head in bemusement. “This must be serious if the fastidious Aach is complaining about waiting.”

“Not complaining, just…” she trained her round brown eyes on him with a matter-of-fact look, “fine – this is boring and I happen to know what they’re debating in there.”

“Don’t pretend you don’t know what Galactic politics is like.”

“You’re right, as always, your highness.”

“I’m sure he’ll be out soon. Even Bail Organa has his limits.”

She walked into her father’s study, did what she has originally come to do and stepped out again, a whirl of robes and Alderaanian-style braids.

“I’m serious. Biscuits, Aach.”

“Sure. Right after I’m done.”

She smiled and practically floated down the hallway to her own office, leaving him in wonder at how she could match the regality of an incumbent to the throne to one of the Core’s most important planets to the lethal dexterity he had personally taught her when serving under her.

The princess was right. It wasn’t long after he heard Senator Organa’s boisterous laugh in the hallway outside.

He stayed standing up, as he was when chatting with Leia. The old senator didn’t interrupt his talking to another aide as he eyed Aach at the door to his study. Aach tried not to fidget as he waited for directions, his face as neutral as possible. Organa made a gesture with his head for him to follow him into his office, telling his secretary in rapid Alderaanian that he was not to be disturbed until he said otherwise.

The door closed behind them and Aach was quick to scan the room for any signs of extra surveillance.

“I was told to speak in Basic, your highness,” he said, as he sat down.

“Ah, well. It is good for our standing with the Empire if we don’t show too big a penchant for… regional habits.”

“I see.”

“You have news from home?”

“Not exactly from home, your highness – it’s more something I’ve been particularly wondering about and started doing some research on in my spare time. I wondered if you would approve.”

The older man raised his dark eyebrows. Aach played with the tassels on his sleeve jacket, a sign of hesitation.

“Well, I am drawing some comparative charts on how much other planets spend their planetary budget on scientific endeavors. I know we have a fund specific for these purposes, but I was hoping that if we look into how particular sectors – even the Empire itself – spend their credits, that we could… augment our own programs.”

“You think there’s more we can do in that regard? That we could learn something we haven’t thought of?”

“Definitely, sir.”

“This needed to be discussed in private because…”

“I didn’t want to come off as insulting your and her majesty’s work on behalf of Alderaanian science, your highness.”

“I don’t know whether to be flattered or angry that you thought I would disapprove, Aach.”

“I always prefer to be cautious, sir. It wouldn’t do to cause any offence.”

“You know I always appreciate your efforts. So does my wife.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Perhaps you should contact Senator Bel Iblis’s office. Maybe they can get you further details on how things are done in Corellia.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Anything else, Aach?”

“No, sir.”

“Very well, then.”

“Thank you, your highness.”

It should be said that Aach didn’t mind being thought as particularly pompous by his colleagues in the senate office if it meant he got his job done, even when it occasionally made Senator Organa himself roll his eyes in annoyance. He bowed formally before ducking out of the senator’s study and continued on to stop by the Princess’s as she had requested. Her own secretary told him to wait outside as her highness finished a holocall with her mother. He let the woman in formal pastel shades clothing and intricately braided hair in front of him see that he could barely contain his mirth as a loud tirade in Alderaanian could be heard from behind the closed door nearest to them.

When Leia finally admitted him, she told him to sit down in one of the large armchairs in her office with a proud countenance.

“What do you think?”

“I think you’re doing really well for yourself.”

“I’ve practicing other things you’ve taught me as well.”

“Senatorial etiquette?”

She snorted. “Yes, that.”

From a table next to her chair, she picked up a bowl that was brimming with Festian biscuits. He turned inquisitive eyes on her, while her mouth curved in a way he had never seen before. It occurred to him that Leia, the young princess he had taught to contain her temper, to say things without saying them and how to most effective and silent way to kill a stormtrooper had suddenly become a woman. He blinked at her and reached out to take a biscuit, which he wasted no time in munching. It reminded him of home; it reminded him of coming home through the annual blizzards after school to his mother waiting him with warmed tea and biscuits very similar to those.

“I knew you liked them,” Leia seemed way too pleased with herself, “ _espero que no te pongas melancólico._ ”

He smiled at her. “ _No, nunca._ _Muchas gracias, su alteza.”_

Aach put out his hand to grab another biscuit and noticed a gleaming datachip in the bowl, tucked amongst the confections. He looked at Leia and she absently nodded, while eating a biscuit of her own. He picked it up and tucked in one of his pockets.

“Very well, I should go back. I have an early transport home tomorrow and loads to do still.”

“Have a good evening and safe trip back, Aach.”

“Thank you, your highness.”

He bowed and casually strolled out of the wing in the Galactic Senate building that housed the senators’ private offices.

**

When he got to their private hangar in the midlevels, Cassian came face to face with Jyn walking around in combat pants, boots and to his immediate discomfort, only a black breastband. Though she came to a halt upon seeing him, she didn’t say anything – mostly because her mouth was holding a handful of hairpins – but he didn’t miss the way her green eyes seemed to steel themselves. As she kept going about her business, he figured it was okay for him to go about his.

He started by tugging off his Alderaanian vest and shirt and sticking his head under a sink they had tucked away in the hangar. He let the fixing product and the black ink he used to give Aach’s blue-black shade of hair rinse out and then quickly toweled his hair off. When he raised his head from the sink, Jyn was next to him, putting brown contact lenses into her eyes with surprising dexterity when her usually bitten and short fingernails were suddenly very long and purple. Her hair was all pinned up, but by now she was wearing a white tank top over her brassiere. Cassian tried not to stare too much at the white expanse of skin it revealed; nevertheless, he catalogued a jagged scar on her shoulder, a healed blaster burn on her side, what looked to be a medical incision on her ribs. She opened her mouth to apply make up in her eyes and then stalked off as he took a pair of trousers from the locker beside the sink and changed his silk blue trousers for it.

“You were at the Senate today,” she said, pulling on a dark green sweater.

“Yes, I told Senator Organa about the direction we’re taking with the information we got off Tivik. I didn’t want to go through the usual channels for it to get to Alliance Council.”

She turned her brown eyes on him quizzically. “You’re ignoring the chain of command?”

“This was something we decided to pursue without the Alliance’s prompting. Tivik just offered it to us and if it pans out... Anyway… I thought it was better to assure it didn’t get mixed up in transmissions. Plus, I trust Senator Organa.”

“All right,” she said, tugging a pink wig over her head, something that made her look soft like a cloud, but still edgy.

“Are you meeting Rook?”

“Yes, we’re playing sabacc again. He’s still waiting on supplies and I want to see what he has to offer before he’s gone.”

He gave her an once-over, still wearing Aach's steel blue eyes, trying to keep his face from betraying a single though; mostly how seeing Jyn become someone else for the first time affected him. They usually stayed apart when they dressed up to meet contacts, Jyn usually preferring the privacy of their ship. She uneasily put on her jewelry; Corellian bracelets and a pair of cheap earrings that she had bought at a street market while they were trailing a target together once.

He nodded, wetting his lower lip.

“Alright,” he said, “I’ll make sure there’s something for you to eat when you get back. Try not to drink any weird cocktails.”

Her lips curved, something sweet and rare, for once not cynical.

“Thanks.”

And with that, she was gone, without a sound as he turned to finish dressing. He heard her ship light up and blast off from the hangar, pretending his chest wasn’t tightening at the thought of her out there without him.

**

Their handlers were currently a couple of Alderaanian middle-aged operatives he and Jyn called Aelia and Gavri, who lived in a small apartment at one of Imperial Center’s middle class levels. While Aelia was emotionally removed, with her white blond hair and inscrutable blue eyes, Gavri couldn’t help but treat his charges with warmth, waiting for them at most times with what he was certain the rebels back in base would call large quantities of food. That evening was no different. As soon as he walked into the modest, but comfortable apartment, he heard the sound of Alderaanian chamber music along with the clattering of kitchen utensils. He paused in the doorway to the kitchen, leaning against the threshold, watching as the heavy-set man stirred something in a large pan. Gavri didn’t turn around.

“Careful there, or you might be caught smiling.”

“What do you do with all this food if Kestrel and I don’t come over?” He asked, allowing himself some humor ahead of what he was sure was going to be a difficult discussion.

“Usually I see how many meals I can make Aelia eat it before she loses her temper,” the older man laughed.

Despite himself, Cassian felt something untighten in his chest. He knew, in an intellectual level, that he and Jyn weren’t the only ones in this sort of situation, forced into closed quarters with someone they barely knew or sometimes even tolerated. He had no idea how Aelia and Gavri actually got along, but he had no illusions that it was no better than him and Jyn on their worst days. It was downright foolish to comfort oneself with other people’s predicaments, but Cassian couldn’t help himself.

It was this sort of current ineptitude that he was here to discuss with Gavri. And for the first time ever in this mission, he was glad the older man was alone at the apartment.

“Get some bowls out, will you?”

As he moved to search the cabinets for what Gavri had asked of him, Cassian figured this was as good time as any to start talking. He quickly relayed the whole Tivik ordeal; how it came around just as he and Kestrel had found they had an interesting new neighbor. He didn’t reveal that Kestrel recognized the Imperial officer, opting instead to describe how he was making good headway into becoming the man’s friend. The crux of the matter here was Tivik’s intel. He told Gavri about Zayz’s meltdown at the Works and his subsequent execution, as they sat down to eat in the small kitchen.

“This is weighing on you,” Gavri said in basic, without Cassian having to give him any details.

“How do you know?”

“Kestrel came over,” Cassian’s eyes shot wide open, but Gavri put a steadying hand on his shoulder, “she said you needed a time-out from this type of situation.”

“I told her I’m fine, that I’d get my shit together. Who does she think sh-“

He had to interrupt himself, as not to let out a bunch of expletives in Alderaanian Festian. A huge part of this mission’s method was never, ever getting linguistically loose. His role in the Senate, in the Organas’ offices was never part of this mission, so he might allow himself to be a little lax there, even though Leia apparently warned him to not be _too_ lax. It didn’t matter that he and Gavri were in a safe-house, screened for any bugging at least three times a day. It didn’t matter that Gavri was Alderaanian and a well-travelled man, who would no doubt understand all his elaborate swear words. In spy work, restraint was everything.

Gavri’s hand was still on his shoulder, fingers digging into his bicep to force him down on his chair.

“If you found anything of concern with her, you would tell us, too. Well, at least tell _me_. I’m not Aelia, or Draven, for that matter,” the older man said, surprisingly gently, “and just by this little display alone, I see that she was right in coming to me. She got worried about you and, no, that does not mean that she thinks you can’t do your job.”

He settled to eat what Gavri had put in front of him – actually Vesti noodles cooked in a rich sauce –, thinking back on all the times he had verbally expressed his distrust in Jyn. That had never been out of concern for her personally; only for the mission ahead of them. He tried not to feel too guilty.

“Right,” he mumbled, “so she has told you all that I’ve just wasted time-“

“No, she didn’t. Not in so many words. She said you had a lead that could be interesting.”

“Interesting, but I initially thought it was far-fetched. I briefed Senator Organa on it. I thought he should hear it from me. Kestrel is meeting Rook as we speak, probably. We’ll see how far we can get with him before he has to fly out again.”

“Fine.”

He was slightly surprised at how easy the part concerning Organa was; he thought he would get a lecture in following procedures.

“The princess gave me this,” he put the datacard on the table, “as far as I can tell, it’s a list of senate liaisons that look good for recruiting. Kestrel and I won’t be able to contact all these people.”

Gavri took the datacard, put it in the front pocket of the vest he wore over his shirt.

“You trained that girl well.”

“Thank you, sir,” he said, munching on his noodles, “this is really good.”

Gavri nodded in thanks and Cassian could feel the change of subject coming from a mile away.

“It’s all right to get tired, Joreth,” said the man warmly, “you’ve been at this for three years now and all that Alliance has managed so far is to inch everyday closer to falling apart. They have no idea what we’re sacrificing. I’m older than you – I’ve been doing this for a long time and I’m used to it. Don’t think I’ve never come close to giving it all up.”

“It used to be better when it was just me and my droid.” He was fully aware that right now he sounded like a child.

“I know this will sound nonsensical and I know you already know this, so I’m just reminding you: Intelligence paired you because they thought the agents would come to rely on each other and not burn out. They never thought these relationships would add to the burden.”

“So you think we should be more open to one another, Kestrel and I?”

He did not want to analyze why that made him relieved, despite his already knowing the rationale behind their operation. Kestrel was his wife. With her he allowed himself to be a number of things in public he would never dare try to be with Jyn. Jyn was someone who he had seen without a shirt on for the first time that same evening and he did _not_ want to dwell on how seeing that much skin had affected him. 

“Not too open, of course. You still have to preserve your covers and the less you know about each other, the better. But sharing your burdens and apprehensions is supposed to be fine. Some other couples are even considering having children, better to integrate themselves to other Imperial families.”

Cassian nodded, looking down.

“What if Tivik’s intel in the end is right? What if the Empire is actually building a weapon that could destroy planets?”

Gavri settled back and looked at him with his warm hazel eyes turned solemn and Cassian braced himself. This was a man who had fought in the Clone Wars, who had done intelligence work in circumstances far more confusing than their current predicament. He rarely talked about his own past, after all, he had a cover of his own to protect, but he never hesitated to talk from experience. He had an inkling that Aelia’s brand of stoicism was due to those very same reasons, since she had also been an intelligence operative for a long time. Whereas her past made her distant and at times even harsh, Gavri’s altogether opposite approach to his charges was founded on the same circumstances. If he and – he surmised – Jyn had both seen a lot in their lifetime, he could only begin to imagine what Gavri and Aelia had been through and what they both conjured as the Galaxy’s future. Cassian was not disappointed by the man’s reply:

“It will be either the end of the Rebellion or its making.”


	6. Crystals

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading. I've been trying to keep a fairly decent update schedule until I'm back at school next week. 
> 
> Things *might* start moving a little faster after this chapter, I promise.

Kaya’s bracelets clinked noisily against the credit chips as she pulled her winnings to her side of the table. She was winning tonight, which meant something was off about Rook. He had ordered her something bitter to drink this time, with a hint of citrus. She had smiled in thanks and they had gone about their game they had done the last time. But something was off, she could tell.

“What is it?” She tossed casually, as she shuffled the cards.

He closed his eyes briefly, muttered something in a language she didn’t understand; there hadn’t been many Jedhans running with Saw at her time there – Tivik was the only one as far as she remembered.

“Do you know what kyber crystals are?”

She knew she didn’t outwardly react, but the sharp pain in her chest was jarring. Things she had kept firmly tucked away – some specifically in a locked box inside her and Cassian’s closet – suddenly came to mind. A humid afternoon in Lah’mu; her mother, as she tried not not to cry, tying a chord around her neck, telling her to trust in the Force. Her father asking her to say she understood something she never could, never had entirely.

“No, I don’t.”

Rook cleared his throat, fidgeted a bit in his seat. She dealt the cards.

“They’re – well, some say they’re attuned to the Force. The Jedi used them to power their lightsabers.”

“Do you believe in the Force?” She asked a little harshly.

“I come from a religious family.”

“So do I,” she countered.

He shrugged at her, looked at his cards.

“The Jedi are extinct,” she said, to keep him going.

“Yes, but the crystals aren’t,” Rook scooted forward in his seat, but kept his stance casual as he fiddled with the credit chips in front of him, “they’re being mined. Have been, for a while now. Even from the Temple in NiJedha.”

She blinked at him, not being able to hold her emotions entirely in check.

“Is this for research? Energy purposes?”

“Yes, but everything the Empire does ultimately has military purposes.”

“Weapons, then.”

“Yes.”

“Does that have anything to do with your cargo shipments lately?”

He shook his head while he placed a bet on the table, his eyes as focused on the cards as they were on her.

“We don’t know what we carry… I’m only a pilot. Officers supervise the shipping manifests, but we don’t go anywhere near them.”

“Could you pull the manifests out of the ship’s computers?”

“Have to admit I’d be afraid to try.”

She nodded slowly, her fingers skimming over her own chips.

“So how do you know about the crystals?”

“I have a friend.”

“Can you give me his name?”

Rook faltered for a moment, his eyes wide.

“Not yet, no.”

Kaya knew she could come off as brutish at times; Cassian had said so more than once. Weirdly enough, Bodhi Rook brought out some softness in her that she didn’t know she had. Perhaps it was what she suspected of her parents’ past; all those late nights here in Imperial Center where her father had been wearing an Imperial uniform. Some rebels, she knew, saw things in black and white; having to survive amongst Saw’s partisans hiding her identity made her see all kinds of shades of gray instead. The young man in front of her was clearly uneasy about what he was doing and it was her job as an operative to put him at ease.

“Alright. Don’t worry. I’ll look into what you’ve told me. It’s good. You’re doing good, Bodhi.”

He breathed unsteadily for a few seconds; fidgeted with the straw in his Mandalorian liqueur cocktail, “can we just play now?”

She gave him a full smile. “Sure thing.”

Kaya left earlier and a few credits richer than the last time, which wasn’t saying much. She had taken leave from Rook with a few words of advice and some instructions on how he could contact her when he was off planet, in case anything went wrong. He seemed, she thought, less apprehensive, if not entirely confident in their scheme, but it was often like that, with new sources.

She flew back to their private hangar and went about the business of becoming once again Kestrel Sward: wig, contacts and fingernails off. She removed her makeup, but put on Kestrel’s, which was something professional and discreet, but that she smudged just the right amount. She dressed again in her rumpled work clothes. Once she took the transport home, she looked like any other ordinary office worker in Imperial City who might have spent the night working late. And since her hours with Rook hadn’t been exactly relaxing, she allowed herself to close her eyes and rest, relying on her instincts and the blaster she had tucked in the inside pocket of her fashionable blazer jacket.

She was walking sluggishly to their apartment, silently praying that Cassian had kept his word and left something out for her to eat when she heard footsteps behind her. She briefly closed her eyes in annoyance, before turning around with a cheerful smile.

“Well, hello, Orson!”

The older man seemed as tired as her, the cape that went with his uniform not quite settling on his tense shoulders. His face was bordering on haggard; his eyes deeply sunk in his face. He looked like he hadn’t eaten in days. From what Cassian had sparsely told her of his missions undercover in the Imperial military, the chain of command often grinded people to their limits in what resembled an animal food chain that ended with the Emperor himself as the top predator. She didn’t feel sorry for the man, but she suddenly knew what she had to do.

“Goodnight, Kestrel. Long day at work?”

“The longest. You too, I assume?”

His smile faltered a bit. “Yes… I was going to knock on your door to see if Joreth wanted a drink, but I’m just knackered.”

She simpered a bit, putting on a mischievous smile, never missing an opportunity when she saw one.

“You look so tired – come and have breakfast with us tomorrow. I’ll try and cook something properly Alderaanian. Then Joreth will think I’ll burn it and cook it himself.”

Krennic laughed. “I wouldn’t want to impose, really.”

“Nonsense. You look like you could use some good food and some company.”

The man cringed and smiled self-deprecatingly. “Do I look that terrible?”

By this point they had walked together up to her door. She put a sympathetic hand on his arm.

“We all look terrible and in dire need of a holiday. Come tomorrow, 0800. Seriously.”

“Very well. Thank you, Kestrel. It means a lot having you both here.”

She smiled sweetly and keyed in her code. As she shut the door behind her, she leaned against it and stopped herself from actually spitting the sour taste that rose up in her mouth.

Cassian was sprawled on the living room couch, asleep, some holodrama playing in the background, going unwatched for apparently a long time. She put her workbag away and hung up her jacket, moving silently towards the kitchen. On the counter she found a sealed container with what looked to be noodles cooked in a thick sauce. Her stomach grumbled at the sight, but she chose to go shower instead.

As she passed Cassian in the living room, the way he was lying down, on his stomach but ready to spring awake at any moment, arrested her for a few moments. His face looked peaceful – as peaceful as a man like him could look as he slept at least, which wasn’t your usual softening of features and looking younger than his years – but his left leg jolted in spasms. His right hand was in a tight fist and as she leaned a little bit closer, she could see his eyelids moving. She thought of shaking him awake, but decided against it. He had told her explicitly that he did not want her coddling her and if the food on the counter was any indication, he had met with Gavri. She trusted the older man with her life, but from what she knew of Gavri – or at least knew of him as a handler – if he thought Cassian was full of it, he would have told Cassian she had brought up the effect’s of Zayz’s killing on him in her last visit.

Jyn was showered and digging into the heated noodles when Cassian appeared in the kitchen, hair askew and face lined from where it had been resting on a seam on their couch, but otherwise alert. He had turned off the holo, but upon seeing her, turned on some music.

“How was Rook?”

“Nervous. Not telling me all that he knew he could tell me.”

Cassian nodded curtly, professional. “Give him time.”

“He’s gone off planet. Wouldn’t tell me where.”

“Did he give you anything?”

“Yes…” she knew she had no good reason to, but found herself hesitating, “something about… kyber crystals.”

“The ones from-“

“The Jedi lightsabers, yes,” she finished for him, knowing he how skeptical he was of such things. Cassian was too pragmatic to be religious, “the Empire’s been mining them from wherever they can find. The official explanation that he says he has heard where he’s posted is that they’re for energy purposes, but even Rook, who’s only a cargo pilot, knows better than that.”

“Tomorrow at the Academy I’ll pull whatever I can find on them,” he said, rummaging around the kitchen for some water.

He poured her a glass, set it next to her plate. If she weren’t feeling so raw from their last argument, she would have rolled her eyes.

“What did you have to drink?” He asked.

“Oh, Rook ordered me something with Dantooinian limes. He’s quite perceptive.”

“Good.”

“You’re cooking us a full Alderaanian breakfast tomorrow, by the way.”

He almost choked on his water. “What? Why?”

“I ran into Krennic when I arrived. He looked like had been trampled by a herd of banthas. Something’s not right in whatever it is he’s supervising. I say we prod him with food and affection.”

At that he relaxed, got back to his nondescript professionalism. Jyn, however, was not done, so she picked some noodles with her fork, held them up in his direction.

“Gavri?”

“Yes,” he said tersely.

Just by that she knew enough. “I am not apologizing to you.”

His lips thinned into a line, his eyes turned towards the laminated floor underneath his bare feet.

“Gavri would say you shouldn’t. It’s fine.”

Jyn hadn’t realized just how far she had raised her hackles just then until she relaxed, munching on the comforting noodles instead. Cassian made to speak again, seemed to give up, but then looked as if he was forcing the words out.

“He says we should count on each other for these types of situations.”

She was still munching her food as talked. “It would be pretty stupid of the Alliance if they set up this sort of operation and we ended up killing each other instead,” she swallowed, “there must a purpose to this other than having a decent cover.”

Cassian shot her one of his non-smiles. “Precisely.”

**

The next morning, Jyn woke up to her alarm and heard cheerful music coming from the kitchen. Cassian’s side of the bed was empty. She grabbed the robe she had hanging at the side of her bed and stepped in the ‘fresher to better coif her wifely image. Kestrel Sward was the type to indulge in little morning rituals before appearing for breakfast, even on a working standard week. Therefore, it was twenty minutes later when she sauntered into the kitchen smiling beatifically at the Imperial officers who were chatting over caff and her husband’s cooking.

Then something happened. She had greeted Krennic, giving him a friendly wink as she commented he looked well, and walked over to Cassian, who was leaning over a pan of fried nuna bacon. She slid her arm over his shoulder, tangling her fingers in his hair. He hadn’t changed into his uniform yet, choosing to avoid any spatter in a plain soft white shirt with its sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He was Joreth at that moment, all smoothness and affability when in company, but when he turned to look at her, there was something decidedly _Cassian_ in his delicate brown eyes. And despite feeling something at the pit of her stomach, Jyn followed their usual protocol and pressed her lips to his in greeting.

Joreth and Kestrel had kissed hundreds of times in the past three years. They had intimately put hands where she had rarely been touched in public before. Joreth liked to kiss her in other places as well - her cheek, her hands, her neck. Everything to let the Galaxy know that she was his. However, they were all perfunctory gestures, just as theirs was a perfunctory marriage. This time, however, Jyn felt something decidedly soften in Cassian’s lips and when she drew back, he chased her mouth, eyes lidded, a breathy wisp of a sigh escaping him. She let him kiss her back, warm and supple, as something hot shot down her spine.

When he drew back and turned to the frying pan, she blinked heavily, suddenly remembering that they had an audience. Cassian seemed to have realized the same thing.

“Sorry, Krennic. We had an argument last night and I thought Kess was still mad at me.”

The man lifted his hands. “Don’t mind me. I feel like I’m intruding. I should apologize for making Kestrel feel sorry for me last night.”

She finally felt thankful for the Alliance’s gruesome training of its intelligence officers as she poured herself some juice with surprisingly steady hands.

“Joreth thinks I work too hard,” she said, working up something of a ridiculous pout, “but I had to remind him that I’ve had to understand all his assignments and postings and missions and whatnot. Speaking of which, is Imperial bureaucracy driving you as mad as I imagine?”

Krennic seemed to consider them both for a moment.

“Amazingly what’s got me worked up isn’t the paperwork. We’ve been having some delays at the building site I oversee and my supervisors have been pressuring me.”

“Well, no surprises there. Bosses are supposed to pressure us, right? And it’s all for the good of the Empire, after all.”

“Yes, definitely. I want nothing more than to serve the Galaxy, but sometimes being pushed around is disheartening.”

Cassian must have sensed the same opening she did, because he was the one to ask as he placed the contents of his skillet on a plate on the table.

“What do they build over on Eadu? I thought it was one of those far-fetched research stations.”

Krennic eyed him carefully, visibly weighing what he could tell a friend and fellow officer, even if much lower in rank.

“We don’t build anything _per se_. It indeed is where research is conducted. The planet was donated to the Empire by Grand Moff Tarkin, you know.”

For Jyn, Krennic’s connection with her parents started to make a lot more sense now. His place within the Imperial machine was becoming clearer as one related to research and not to infrastructure building as they had first assumed. But she tried to reign in her assumptions; she had had it ingrained in her after two years on the Alliance’s camp in Dantooine that intelligence work meant gathering information and not so much analyzing it. That was someone else’s job.

“All I know about Eadu from work is that it rains an awful lot there,” she said conversationally.

“Yes, it is a bit dismal. And that is why I am relieved to be here… And of course, thankful for your company.”

They settled to eat quietly after that, mostly just commenting on the food. Jyn was always slightly bemused at how well Cassian passed for an Alderaanian, despite knowing, from his accent, that he wasn’t originally from there. He even adopted, when around other officers, the typical debonair countenance of Alderaanian men like Gavri, never sparing dimpled smiles to anyone. She always wondered at how he acquired all those mannerisms and made them seem so natural. This morning, though, she was very close to letting it discomfit her.

As soon as she deemed it reasonable, she excused herself and went to get ready for work.

**

She waited until Cassian left to do it, since she still had time before heading to the office. Both of them had vaults in their closet with private codes where they kept a few personal items. Neither had much in the way of that, which said a lot about their way of life. This was morning, Jyn rummaged through hers to look for a leather pouch where she kept the only thing she had left of her parents.

The crystal warmed to the touch almost immediately when shook it out of its casing. It was colorless, engraved with sayings in ancient language the meaning of which she couldn’t begin to guess, tied to a rough piece of string she remembered being tied by her mother’s coarse cold fingers the morning she had last seen her. She had been told to trust in the Force and despite the encroaching cynicism that she felt over the years, she hung on to that, that delicate sliver of the little girl she once was.

She knew her mother was a geologist born on Aria Prime who had gone to university on Rudrig, but could not find no record of her other than her time spent in prison in Vallt, when she was arrested with her husband by that planet’s Separatist government. Jyn had been born there. Records on her father were more numerous, regarding his research on kyber crystals, but tapered off around the time the family had fled to Lah’mu, a few years after he landed a visiting professorship on Coruscant. Jyn knew that Krennic had something to do with her parents’ disappearance, but her knowledge of what it was they actually did was too vague. If her parents’ history was anything to go by, the Empire had been researching kyber crystals since before she was born, so Bodhi Rook’s intel was hardly anything new. Krennic’s posting at a research facility could mean any number of things.

Jyn took a steadying breath and told herself that she had nothing but vague leads and none that meant she was going to find out what had happened to her parents. It was best that she deal with it now just as she had been dealing with it all her life. The past was supposed to be just that, Saw had always taught her, something that _passed._

So she shrugged out of her maudlin state of mind, said a prayer to the Force and to her parents, wherever they were, and tucked the crystal back in its casing, locking it back into her vault.

Kestrel Sward arrived for work that morning fresh faced, carrying a cup a caff, smiling just as cheerfully as always at her colleagues.


	7. Sustainable energy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not sure about the pacing of this, but this is my last day of vacation and I wanted to get a chapter in before facing the real world again.I hope at times this won't read like a Wookiepedia entry. 
> 
> Thanks for reading once more. Your kind comments only make me want to write more.

It had been a hectic day for Joreth Sward at the Royal Imperial Academy. He had broken up at least three scuffles among cadets from different classes; then he had overseen four rounds of shooting practice and written disciplinary reports on those three scuffles from earlier. People used to grimace when he mentioned that he had served in the Unknown Regions, but supervising rowdy spoiled teenagers – mostly of good families from the Core worlds – was probably deserving of as much empathy. Not that Joreth Sward knew what it was actually like being an Imperial officer in the Unknown Regions… The original Joreth Sward had gone MIA in those very same campaigns, which was awfully convenient, since he fit the profile of one particular Alliance Intelligence officer enough to be accepted as Sward after returning from apparent death.

He had time, however, to venture into the library on a break when most students were in classes and hack into the system to download every single morsel of information it might have on kyber crystals onto a datapad that wasn’t academy property. After work, he joined two of his colleagues for drinks in a swanky bar nearby. Joreth made sure he comed his wife about his whereabouts in front of them, just so he could take their ribbing good-naturedly.

Both men Joreth was friendly with were the sort of Core Worlds men who went about their lives seemingly oblivious of their privilege. Joreth, being an Alderaanian and therefore the more “exotic” of them, put himself as a sort of foil for their bragging and general posturing. He was, nonetheless, often the target of flirting men and women in their outings and took an awful amount of envious teasing from his comrades. They were Edd Berik, a piloting instructor, and Silas Haren, who taught physics to first year cadets. Joreth bonded with the men in his first year there, when both men were having trouble with particular students who were sons of Imperial admirals and who unsurprisingly had trouble with authority. Joreth had been assigned to keep an eye on them; disciplining them and at the same not offending their parents too much. For all their brash thoughtlessness, both Berik and Haren seemed to empathize with the newly arrived Sward and, upon finding out that he was a veteran of such grueling campaigns, decided to take him under their wings. Sward did little to resist their friendship despite his lower status.

They had hardly been useful to Sward’s purposes, except where they might make his life easier dealing with spoiled Imperial brats. However, as soon as they settled at Affie’s Corner with their pints of Corellian ale, he figured that being “friends” with a science teacher might have its advantages. Not, though, regarding the kyber crystals; that line of enquiry might be too dangerous.

“Haren, have you ever heard of a Lieutenant Commander Orson Krennic?”

Silas Haren grabbed a handful of Affie’s complimentary nuts and started eating one by one, seeming to measure his words.

“Yeah, sure. One of the Empire’s most prestigious scientists. He has led loads of projects for the Emperor, mostly relating to sustainable energy. Why?”

“He lives across the hall from me and Kestrel,” Joreth shrugged noncommittally, “we’ve been watching smashball games together.”

Haren’s eyes grew to the size of saucers, taking over most of his freckled face.

“You’re kidding.”

Joreth laughed at the man’s reaction. Berik seemed equally amused.

“I didn’t know you had idols, Haren.”

“You don’t understand,” Haren replied, “this man has been a leading scientist since the Old Republic; he was in the Corps of Engineers; he’s got Tarkin’s ear. We don’t know half the things he could be involved with.”

Joreth took a pull from his ale. “Such as what?”

“What everyone said at the time I was at university was that he’s been involved in weapon’s programs since before the Empire – he was in something called the Republic Special Weapons Group – but of course, no one has any confirmation of that. It was always someone’s dad who knew someone who had heard that Krennic was up to whatever. He’s supposed to be this genius who we know very little about. I had no idea he lived here in Imperial Center.”

Joreth snorted. “Yes, and quite fond of telling Kestrel all sorts of amusing jokes. I’m going to invite you sometime he’s over at our place.”

Haren almost bounced in his seat, to Berik’s infinite mirth. Joreth, however, was left with much food for thought.

He went home straight from the bar, taking public transportation since Kestrel had their ship that day. The datapad filled with information on kyber crystals would be an excellent way not to think about what had happened between them that morning, when she had walked up to him in the kitchen all soft and smelling of fresh soap, and had put her fingers through his hair. He was honestly furious with himself for being so weak; weak regarding their mission and their jobs and what they entailed, and weak regarding his wife, who was actually another part of this mission. He doubted other agents were having these same dilemmas: hands shaking after taking out a target, becoming putty in their partner’s grip because their eyes were not quite green and not quite gray and also belied gentleness behind a fascinating ferocity. He had always preferred working alone, the Imperial security droid he had reprogrammed as a teenager the only allowance he made when it came to company. If he was honest with himself, it was a wonder he was starting to lose control after three years instead of three months.

When he arrived home, Cassian found a message from Jyn saying she was out for a run, which usually meant that she was making a drop. He was momentarily relieved in not having to face her just yet and went into their bedroom to shuck off his uniform and take a shower. Becoming someone else had always been easy for him; had been since his parents had died and he ended up hopping from one planet to the other with the rebel cell in Fest that had adopted him after finding him angrily throwing rocks at deathtroopers, enraged and weak with hunger and sorrow. His hardest stint undercover so far had been as Cassein Willix, a cadet at Carida Imperial Academy, not only because it was the planet where his father had been killed, but also because it was the first time he became that which he most loathed. Being Joreth Sward, therefore, was not particularly novel, but sometimes just as difficult, especially because its long-term goals meant that Cassian went months without the satisfaction of having achieved something for the Rebellion. He had just had a supposedly good day, with Berik dishing out on the rumors behind Krennic’s role in the Imperial war machine, but he found that the emotional numbness that usually went with sitting down to have ale with men such as his colleagues had its limits.

So it was with a slight sense of urgency that he sat down to read up on the crystals and after several pages on the mythical meaning of the not-quite-minerals for ancient religions, he finally found what he was looking for. The crystals had been mined for centuries by the Jedi and Sith, because they were the source of power for their lightsabers, just as he already knew. Cassian’s ambivalence towards religion, mostly after years of feeling let down by whatever cosmic order of things people said was responsible for his fate, made him at first slightly skeptical of the information he was reading there, particularly in how the crystals could be manipulated in order to serve the purposes of the Dark Side of the Force. Apparently, the crystals turned red from bleeding. The Jedi never tried to industrially mine the crystals in their places of origin, most famously the planet Ilum, but instituted the practice as a passing ritual for the members of the order. The Sith, however, tried to develop powerful weapons manipulating the crystal’s energy.

As far as the bibliography he found at Academy’s library went, both the Republic and the Empire had attempted to mine the crystals in order to provide sustainable energy in planets where that had been hard to come by. The material he found especially mentioned an experimental physicist named Galen Erso, who had won a handful of scientific prizes and who had held a teaching position in Coruscant for a few years. As far as Cassian could see, the man was the author of most of the scientific articles on the crystals, but his academic production came to an abrupt halt and nothing else could be found from some point seventeen years before now. However, when Cassian went to read up on the government project – something called Celestial Power – in which Erso had been involved, another name practically screamed at him from the datapad: Orson Krennic.

If Cassian was the type to believe in such things, he wouldn’t be able to tell if it was his or Jyn's dumb luck that the lead they had been pursuing could be further developed by ringing a doorbell across the hall. At the same time, it meant that Tivik’s intel was becoming more and more solid at every turn. He took a few quiet breaths to calm his heartbeat and it was sitting in an armchair with his head thrown back that Jyn found him when she got home, cheeks flushed and hair matted from exercise.

“What’s going on?” She asked him, when he couldn’t seem to say anything except stare at her in some bewilderment.

He turned the Holonews as loud as he could while she stared at him with her eyes wide, seemingly oblivious to the drops of sweat that ran from her soaked hair down her pink neck.

“Krennic’s linked to the intel we got from Tivik.”

She blinked at him. “You mean when we joked after dinner that time…”

“It could very well be it.”

Her only response was to wipe several times at her face, as if to clear her thoughts.

“What now? We still have no confirmation on any of this.”

“We need to get more from Rook. Krennic’s not going to give us anything. If we ask him about his involvement with kyber crystals research, he’s only going to give us some banthashit on sustainable energy.”

“What else did you find out?”

“Nothing. Just the name of some scientists who were involved in the energy programs.”

Her initial surprise seemed to dull somewhat, her face returning to the usual neutral expression he often wore himself. She was Kestrel Sward, the logistics expert, just having arrived home after a jog; a beautiful woman, but ordinary. Just like him.

“How were the boys?”

He scoffed. The slight triumph at getting Haren to dish on what he knew about Krennic slightly silly now that he found he had actually had more than that info in his datapad the entire time.

“Haren, the physics teacher, is a big fan of Krennic’s. Told me some of the rumors that went around when he was in university… That Krennic was involved with a secret weapons program for the Republic.”

“Well, that’s more corroboration on what we thought of as Tivik being desperate.”

“Yeah.”

Jyn was about to open her mouth to speak when suddenly their private comlink gave a signal. It was a simple message for Cassian regarding a doctor’s appointment, but as was the case with these messages lately, it was like someone had poured icy water down his back. He shot Jyn a glance, looked at her fisted hands, still slightly swollen from her run.

“Go shower,” he sighed, “we need to go out.”

She eyed him dubiously for a few moments, but silently walked away, heading to their bedroom.

**

In the end, they just tailed their target for a couple of hours, their scandocs saying they were Jas and Celyn Lasch – he a salesman from Mantooine and she a communications technician from Chandrila. The woman they were following was a diplomatic attaché from Celyn’s planet, who their very hurried brief said was a threat to Mon Mothma’s secret role in the Alliance Council. If Jas and Celyn could manage, they were to “terminate” her as soon as possible.

Throughout their ride in a small private ship someone had left for them in a private hangar near The Works, Jas saw that Celyn made a great effort to keep her apparent concern for him at bay. He saw that she had elected to keep her luscious head of auburn hair loose around her face, better to hide her expression whenever he looked in her direction as she piloted. In the end they quickly decided on the best spot for him to use his precision rifle. Celyn had wanted to just pilot by as he shot out of the viewport, best for him not to loiter around the scene having do dissemble a precision rifle and think too much on what he had just done. Jas saw that if they could break into the corporate restaurant across from her building and at the same level as her apartment complex, they could minimize any collateral damage. He won out in the end, because Celyn couldn’t even begin to argue with the hollowed out look he gave her even in unfamiliar green irises.

Celyn and Jas grabbed some Tapani food before heading to the hangar they were supposed to drop their ship back.

**

Cassian would later establish the day after they received their assignment to kill the Chandrilan diplomatic attaché as when things started spiraling out of his control. He had spent the day at the Academy, dealing with troublesome teenagers and barking out orders, as he was supposed to, but by the time his hours were done, he stopped by his and Jyn’s hangar in the lower levels to change into the appearance of an average university student named Vinn Garq. Vinn, with his nondescript longish white hair, had angular shaved features and his non-assuming clothing was perfect to disappear among the university archives in order to do research on a paper on educational policy in the establishment of the Empire.

Vinn was quick to charm the archivists, with his dimpled smiles and his eye-rolls, complaining that he had to write papers for classes on the history of the Empire when he would much rather be reading on ship maintenance. By establishing such quick and affable rapport with the overworked women who were in control of the searching engines, he quickly got them to worry about the other students who also had papers due that week and who were having trouble with their research. He waved them off as soon as he appeared to have a grasp on what he was looking for, silently blessing the timing of his coming here for the end of the academic term. None of the women working at the archive that afternoon saw that Vinn for some reason pulled information on a former visiting professor to the University of Coruscant named Galen Erso.

Most of the information Vinn set out to look over that afternoon in an individual research booth at the archives was typical of a professor’s record. Classes’ syllabuses, articles published while affiliated to that institution, a holo recording of a lecture on kyber crystals and their applied uses in clean energy. The man seemed happy talking about his scientific pursuits, a gleam in his eye visible even through the old holo recording. He made jokes and referred to his wife Lyra, who was apparently in the audience, as the fiercest critic of his academic work. Not in any moment did Galen Erso refer to the crytals’ potential use as a weapon, until he said he was open for questions and a student asked about the lightsabers. Galen Erso’s reply was what any typical Imp would say:

“We are striving to establish peace in the Galaxy,” Vinn had to admit the man had a pleasant voice even as he scoffed at his words, “I believe in using these crystals to improve the lives of beings across the Galaxy, give them quality of life, independent of their species or if they are close or far to the Core. Clean energy is a big part of that. Waging war should not be our priority.”

After watching Erso answer other questions on the technicalities of faceting the crystals to better harness their energy, Vinn moved to another, shorter holo he found: an interview by the university gazette, recorded at the Erso’s apartment in Imperial Center. In it, Erso seemed comfortable, telling anecdotes of research missions in far away worlds, of facing imprisonment after defying a Separatist government on Vallt. At one point, Vinn heard who he assumed was Erso’s wife ribbing him for embellishing a particular story where she had saved both of them from starvation in some backwater planet mostly because she knew what plants _not_ to eat.

Then, at one particular moment, something or someone got in the way of the holorecorder and moved towards Erso. It was a little girl, in coveralls and pigtails, carrying some type of doll. When Erso picked her up to settle her on his lap as he kept talking to the interviewer, Vinn noticed she had wide eyes and bucked teeth, and in a brief second his heart constricted at the thought that her fate was probably as unknown as her parents’. She started tugging at her father’s Imperial dress jacket, required for all personnel at the university after the rise of the Empire. The man smiled apologetically at the university gazette’s crew and spread a wide hand over his small daughter’s hair.

“What is it, Jyn?”

Everything came metaphorically crashing around him. This was no coincidence. Jyn knew Krennic from when she was a child. Krennic was basically Galen Erso’s boss at Project Celestial Power. There was no way that the small innocent large-teethed girl on Galen Erso’s lap was not the same woman who lay down to sleep next to him every single night.

Vinn Garq shut down the holoprojector and left his research booth, picking up his comlink as soon as he was at a decent distance.

“Mom, I need to borrow some credits for lunch tomorrow. Can you meet me?”

**

Aelia was infuriatingly calm when he arrived, sitting on a park bench while knitting a scarf in a pattern that looked way too complicated. He only _appeared_ calm, sitting next to the older woman with his hands tucked into his leather jacket.

“What do we know of Kestrel’s background?” He immediately asked.

Aelia didn’t stop the needles from moving in her fingers.

“She was with Saw Gerrera’s partisans since she was eight; his best slicer, hacker and overall fighter. She’s very intelligent.”

 _You don’t need to tell me that_ , he thought bitterly.

“We know nothing of her previous life?”

“Draven probably does. But for some reason, Gerrera was eager to get rid of her. We were only happy to take up on his offer.”

“So you have no idea why she in particular was picked for this job?”

“Apart from her being very good in the field, even if a bit… rough, not really. It isn’t easy to come across people like you, Joreth. And believe it or not, Kestrel _is_ like you.”

He took a deep breath, counting backwards from twenty, as if he would if he were ready to take out a target from long range. Aelia dared for a second to look concerned.

“You think she is compromised?”

“I don’t know. I’ll have to confront her.”

“Is the operation in danger?”

“I don’t think so. Not yet.”

“You know what to do if you think-“

“Yes, but no. I won’t go there.”

“Joreth, the Alliance comes first. I know we get close to the people we are working with but-“

“I know what I’m supposed to do. Doesn’t mean I’m going to do it. And I don’t care what you have to say. I know it all.”

“Fine.”

“I’m going home. I’m going to talk to her. Get a sense out of this… mess… I’ll com you to let you know how it goes.”

Aelia looked at him with her glacial blue eyes devoid of any expression, something he had seen in the mirror many times. With any luck, she would see her own hypocrisy and understand what he was going through. He got up from the bench and disappeared into the crowd, like he was trained to do.

**

He had been sitting on the armchair facing their apartment foyer when she came home, her hair tied in a messy bun, cheeks scarlet, eyes blinking rapidly as if she was thinking about too many things at once. He had no idea where she had been, but something must have happened. Jyn must have been awfully distracted, because sitting there in the darkness of the living room, he startled her, her hands jerking as they hung up her jacket on the coat rack there.

She turned on the HoloNet with a sense of urgency, some nonsense dialogue blasting from the speakers, and opened her mouth to speak. Cassian was quicker, though and he kept his gaze firmly on her features.

“When was the last time you were in contact with your father?”


	8. Out there somewhere

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Your comments and kudos give me life. 
> 
> I wrote this a couple of days ago, but only found the time to post it now. Hope you enjoy it.

This was the sort of evening that she thanked the Force for her training. Hours and hours standing in high-heeled shoes, smiling at people she didn’t know, with at least some hors d’oeuvres to compensate for such extenuating work, her ears pricked for anything remotely important. She only feigned interest in the hovering paintings in the gallery, her sensibilities more attuned to the string music played by a quartet of Chiss musicians. This was the sort of thing she would have grown up accustomed to, if her family hadn’t fallen apart so soon in her life: parties in Imperial Center’s highest level, where she could see the expanse of urban sprawl fade into the horizon with millions of glittering lights, her body clad in expensive and formfitting cloth, her bejeweled hand holding a flute of sparkling wine like it was a lifeline. A life perhaps a little similar to the one the woman she was to meet here led.

Her bored countenance must have drawn attention, however, because she only had to wander aimlessly for a few seconds for a svelte arm to curl around her shoulders.

“You’re bored,” her companion said with a pout.

Lennu Croburg, a petite librarian with honey-colored eyes and striking jet-black short hair smiled at her friend, Coruscanti socialite Jilldani Ceras, the wife of an Imperial commander, daughter of one of Imperial Center’s most famous magnates. She rolled her eyes fondly.

“Have you managed to take enough holos? You should try those little dumplings they’re serving. I don’t know what kind of cheese they’re filled with.”

“Len, you’re babbling.” Lennu wrinkled her nose and Jilldani laughed. “I know you don’t like these things, but when Nell said she couldn’t make it, I thought-“

Lennu threw her friend a conspirational smile. “You thought we’d make a date of it.”

Jilldani picked a glass of sparkling Alderaanian wine from a droid carrying a tray as if it was flower in a bushel. “Exactly.”

She kept a respectable distance from Lennu, but her tone had been intimate. Jilldani’s arm had long since fallen from her shoulders and now both women were simply standing next to each other, as if contemplating one particular garish abstract painting, its crimsons and oranges somehow unsettling Lennu’s mind. Lennu subtly reached out with her fingers, almost imperceptibly skimming them over the skin in the inside of her friend’s wrist.

“You know, I saw that they have some unused rooms in the back,” she mumbled.

Jilldani narrowed her eyes. “You didn’t come for the pictures, did you?”

“The pictures are lovely, although I don’t particularly like this one,” she gestured to the work of art before them, “and your company is wonderful. But it’s so hard to watch you making insipid conversation with those boring men and not just want to rip your clothes off.”

“Len!”

Lennu’s large eyes just blinked innocently at her. Jilldani smirked and looped an arm through hers, leading her to the nearest exit. They got into the first empty room they could find in the gallery and hurriedly shut the door behind them, their breaths mingling while they laughed. Lennu promptly shoved her hand under Jilldani’s dress, eliciting a squeal from the other woman, who sunk her teeth into her shoulder as she made quick work of the laces in the front of her bodice. Less than fifteen standard minutes later, both women were on the floor, each with upended evening gowns, their expensive footwear scattered around them. Thankfully, neither of them were Alderaanian and mandated to wear that planet’s elaborate hairstyles. Lennu thought that it would be a nightmare returning those sorts of updos to some semblance of order after a quickie with her girlfriend in some public place. She reached out and wiped at Jilldani’s smudged eye make-up.

“So how come Nell couldn’t come?”

Jilldani threw her a knowing grin, her fingers drawing circles up Lennu’s left thigh.

“Ah, precisely the reason I invited you to this shindig.”

“You mean it wasn’t to get into my pants?”

Jilldani and Lennu had bonded over charity work with children in the lower levels, talking while they packed meals at a shelter. At some point in their friendship, Jilldani began complaining about the Coruscanti elite, about how the Empire was taking for granted those who it was supposed to protect. Lennu had never expressed her political opinions, even when their relationship became more intimate. It wasn’t until after almost a year of their affair that Lennu let it slide that she had friends in the Rebellion who could use some information. Just the sort of information that, conveniently, Jilldani’s wife might share with her occasionally.

“There’s been a pretty serious defection. A cargo pilot.”

Lennu’s eyebrows rose. “Oh?”

“A guy named Bodhi Rook. Apparently he’s got some very damning intel, because they’re tearing the Galaxy looking for him.”

Lennu felt something funny trickle down her spine, but focused instead on putting her hand on Jilldani’s neck and kneading at the muscles there.

“What do you mean?”

“This guy was stationed in some research facility Force knows where and simply took off. Didn’t get to his destination, didn’t return, didn’t make for any spaceport in his route. Just went off the grid. His ship’s system is still operational, though. He’s out there somewhere, they just don’t know where.”

Lennu fiddled with her skirt, her hand swapping Jilldani’s away when it got close to too sensitive skin.

“That’s insane, Jill.”

Jilldani turned grave, almost childlike. She might be someone’s trophy wife, she might spend her days in luxury and mindless art exhibits and parties far away from what truly happened in the Galaxy. It didn’t mean she was ignorant, or insensitive, or, most of all, scared. She had always doubted her usefulness to Lennu’s friends – as they called the Alliance – and Lennu was always quick to assure her that she was being a huge help, urging her always, with little fervent kisses, to be careful.

“Is there someway- Is this useful?”

Lennu’s eyes softened, she cupped her lover’s chin in her hands and kissed her sweetly.

“Yes, it is. My friends might have a chance to get to him first. But for that to happen, I need you to stop doing what you’re doing with your fingers.”

Jilldani smirked, pulled her hand out, and got up.

“Well, do you need a ride somewhere?”

**

Jyn tore through the evening traffic, still tugging off her hairpins. She had used the comlink to alert Gavri and Aelia, but she had to get home. She had to know what Cassian had found out at the Academy today, if it confirmed their worst fears. Who knew what Rook was thinking, going off like that, kriff knew where. She could wring his little neck; if he was that desperate, he should have told her so they could engineer an extraction. He could have been sitting right now in the war room back in Yavin IV or wherever the fark the Alliance was currently based, dishing out everything he knew to Draven. She’d kill him when she found him, even if he was dead already.

Jyn fidgeted in her jacket as she piloted, her hands slightly shaking, and then let out a snort. She was pretty sure she still smelled like she had just had a romp in a closet. For a second she was slightly worried about what Cassian would think, but then shut that line of thought immediately. He knew she didn’t have feelings for Jilldani. She _cared_ about Jilldani, sensed some sort of sadness and a profound lack of self-esteem, but that was it. If she had to put a blastershot between the young woman’s eyes, she’d feel terrible, but she wouldn’t hesitate. This was their job. Well, _that_ particular thought sent her in another spiral of concern for Cassian…

She practically leapt from the piloting seat and barreled down the ramp of their ship when she got home, almost breaking into a run to head to their apartment. She prayed Cassian was home, or awake, or not in the shower. She’d have no problem breaking into the ‘fresher if that was the case. She was so distracted as she went in, chucking her jacket and fumbling with the HoloNet, she nearly jumped out of her skin when she saw him sitting there, in the dark, his usually gentle eyes set in hardness. A shiver went through her and she stared at him wide eyed for a millisecond. She turned the HoloNet on and was about to start telling him of Bodhi Rook, when he said:

“When was the last time you were in contact with your father?”

Well, she couldn’t say that after the last few days this was wholly unexpected, but she still felt something crash to the bottom of her stomach with a sense of finality.

Jyn quickly gathered her thoughts, though. A life with Saw Gerrera was bound to account for something. She subtly put her hand back, reaching for the blaster tucked into the waistband of her trousers, fully aware that Cassian knew what she was doing and almost expecting him to shoot her in turn. He didn’t.

She brought her hand forward and trained the blaster on him, her voice cracking.

“What?”

She realized that for once in her life, she was asking questions before shooting.

Cassian’s eyes widened slightly when he saw the blaster and he put his hands up. She could have laughed out loud. Revising her train of thought, deep down she _knew_ he would never do what she was doing now.

“Galen Erso, your father. When was the last time you talked to him?”

“Fifteen years ago. He’s dead as far as I know.”

“You can put the blaster down, Jyn.”

“The kriff I will.”

“You know Krennic because your father worked for him. Something called Project Celestial Power, supposedly for bringing sustainable energy to far away planets. Supposedly.”

“I don’t know. One day we ran the fark away from this place.”

“That was when you were four.”

“Yes.”

“Where did you go?”

“Cassian, are you going to shoot me or not?”

He looked at her for about two seconds with his face neutral and then slowly began to break down. It was like staring directly at a sun and she had to fix her eyes elsewhere or else, she might have fallen apart.

“You know I won’t. Despite what anyone might say about it.” She changed the blaster’s aim from his chest to his knee. “I’m not even armed.”

She just glared at him.

“Jyn, I have no proof that your father was part of any weapons program. I just know that he was an Imperial scientist. We don’t know anything about each other’s lives. I _had_ to ask.”

“Saw picked me up. My mother knew him from the time she was a student. They trusted him.”

“All right, fine. Please, put the blaster down. I’m not going to hurt you.”

She ignored him. Kept her teeth clenched to stop her chin from trembling. _Force, she was pathetic._

“Jyn, please.”

She finally felt comfortable again to speak, lowering the blaster only a bit, keeping it trained on his leg.

“You’ve been on and on lately about how I need to trust you. I want to. But I need to feel like you trust me back. I can’t-“

“Yes, you can. Just tell me what you know.”

She sighed, exasperated. “That’s just it. I don’t know anything. I was eight. They told me to run. I ran. I never saw them again.”

Cassian frowned, his hands still up, eyes fixed on the blaster pointed at his leg.

“Who took them?”

“I only saw their ship. They were Imps and I don’t know if they took them at all. I always found it better to presume they were killed that day.”

Saw had taught her that. She had come across others in the Galaxy whose loved ones had, like her parents, just vanished one day. She knew, deep down, that there was always the slight possibility that her parents could be found or that they find her themselves, but Saw had never indulged that line of thought. He told her she had to forget who she was, especially because that might pose a danger to her. A scientist’s daughter, whether that scientist was dead or alive, would prove to be too valuable an asset or even a hostage. Furthermore, Jyn had seen other fighters in her situation that barely kept their sanity, almost too overcome with hope that they might find their disappeared or even their remains, seeing evidence of them that wasn’t always there. As haunted as she was by her ghosts, she always, always managed to keep them at bay. Hope was not something she indulged in.

She looked in Cassian’s eyes and saw again just how barely he was holding himself together. He just nodded her, conveying that he accepted what she was saying.

She lowered her blaster and only barely heard him let a breath out.

“What was it that you were going to say when you came in?”

 _Oh_.

She had put that completely out of her mind.

“Rook went AWOL. Not even the Imps know where he is, but my guess is that they won’t take long to find him.”

“Kriff.”

“Aelia and Gavri. We need-”

“Yes.”

“If he was that desperate-“

“Yes, if I could I would kick his arse from here to the Unknown Regions…” she cringed slightly, “we had something else to do tonight.”

Cassian slapped a hand over his face and ran it down his features.

“Go get ready, I’ll get a hold of Aelia and tell her where we stand.”

Jyn took a deep breath and tried to steady her heartbeat, as she gingerly walked further into the apartment. She hadn’t realized she was still standing near the door. When she walked into the shower, it took her an extra amount of soap for her to wash off the weight of her confrontation with Cassian.

**

Jas handed her a nutrient bar while he assembled his rifle in the corporate restaurant they had just broken into. Celyn kept her binoculars trained on the diplomatic attaché’s apartment window even as she ripped the wrapper with her teeth and bit into it, mumbling her thanks as she chewed.

“I can’t believe she’s late tonight of all nights,” she said, running her tongue over her back teeth to unstick the nutrient bar’s syrupy substance to them.

“I’d much rather not do this in a hurry,” Jas replied, putting his eyes to the rifle’s scope.

“It’s your call, really,” she remarked coolly, “but I don’t want us having time to get our heads in a tizzy over this.”

When she said “us” and “our” she obviously meant “you” and “your”. Jas lifted his head and just raised his brows at her. She shrugged.

Suddenly, there it was. The private ship they had tailed the night before entered a private hangar in the building across from them. She could feel, rather than hear, Jas’s slow breathing next to her, as she packed her binoculars up and went to keep watch by the door of the room they were in. Her job was to provide him backup and she also knew it wouldn’t do to be hanging over his shoulder as he did what she knew was the hardest part of their job for him. Celyn kept her ears open for any sounds coming from further into the building and tried to ignore her partner until she got indication that she had to do otherwise.

Then she heard it, the faint sound of smashing glass. She risked a glance at the window and saw the pastel colored lump of fabric she knew was the attaché on her apartment’s floor, her head probably adorned with a precise and fatal blaster burn. Jas was packing up the rifle in a hurry, his hands slightly shaking and then he was next to her, grabbing her elbow with a gloved hand. It was first time he had touched her that evening. It burned even through the leather of his gloves and the vinyl of her jacket. She thoughtlessly shrugged it off.

When they got to the closed building’s lobby, where the security droid had been incapacitated with a couple of stun bolts, they saw a couple of Imperial police officers outside.

“Kriff,” she said, “we’ll have to make a run for it.”

Jas pulled out his blaster and walked off before she could formulate any sort of plan, shooting both men. They set off in a run, turning into the first alley they could find.

“And _I’m_ the reckless Partisan,” she huffed, catching her breath.

“And _I’m_ the impractical Alliance wimp,” he countered.

She ignored him. “This is the time I curse Draven not to give us at least an astromech.”

He nodded. “I miss K2.”

She was quizzical for a second, but ignored him, setting off to explore the end of the alley they were in. She found they could slip under a railing at the back and they would end up in the other block, where they could escape through an access ladder to the level where they had left their ship. Nothing was easy, though. They had to shoot out their way towards it, since they found police droids near it. Celyn at one point slipped, hissed as her ankle gave away from under her in a bad angle. Jas was ahead of her, jumping into the small ship’s cockpit and revving it up. She only had the job of throwing herself into its open hood.

“You all right?”

“Yeah, yeah. Just… let’s go. They’re not following us yet.”

**

“That’s swollen,” Cassian said, when she tugged off her boot to have a look at her foot.

Jyn limped with one foot still boot-clad to pick at the medkit he had pulled out of a locker. She fiddled with a bacta patch, sticking it on her ankle joint and briefly scrunching up her face as she felt its hot and cold effect on her skin. She kept her foot bare as she peeled off her jacket and blouse to change into the clothes she worn to their hangar. She tugged a tank top over her breast band and shoved Celyn’s auburn wig off her head. Cassian was doing the same thing next to her, peeling off Jas’s dark whiskers, beard and his green hair. She kept her eyes on his as he pulled off his shirt and chucked off his synthleather trousers, tucking her fingers into her palms in order to quell the urge to touch him. His hands had stopped shaking when he saw himself having to pilot their ship back, but his eyes seemed almost out of focus. She had to remind herself that she was still mad at him.

He turned to her then, his eyes lowered as he slipped on a shirt and walked in her direction.

“Whatever happens when we talk to Gavri and Aelia, you have to know that I think we work well together. I never felt like you didn’t have my back. Even today.”

She felt her hackles going up, but suddenly realized that if her cover was blown with the Alliance, if they knew that she wasn’t just Liana Hallick, Saw Gerrera’s finest partisan, she would need his support, and she thought she had it. Jyn reminded herself that she had been sleeping unarmed next to this man for three years, something she hadn’t done since her parents disappeared.

She nodded and held her hand out to him. He took it, squeezed her fingers in his, rubbing them with his thumb. She pressed her lips together and looked down. She was still with one foot booted and the other bare, which was almost devoid of feeling from the bacta patch. She thought her voice sounded weird when she finally spoke.

“Let’s go. They’ll be waiting for us.”

“I really hope Gavri has food,” he said.

She felt laughter bubbling up, unbidden, more out of nervousness than anything.

When they arrived at Gavri and Aelia’s, the apartment was eerily quiet. Normally they had the HoloNet on or some music, anything to make it look like an average middle class couple’s home. Cassian flickered on the lights as she led them to the private study, where she had sensed some movement. When the door hissed open in the room, neither Gavri nor Aelia were there and she had to contain her surprise for the second time that same evening.

There, in their respective planets’ customary clothes, standing in silence on the other side of Gavri’s heavy wooden desk were senators Mon Mothma and Bail Organa. Organa was serious, his eyes set, arms crossed on his chest. Mothma shot them the hint of a smile and as Jyn knew she was prone to, said a little bit dramatically:

“Hello, Cassian. Hello, Jyn.”


	9. A trip

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really like writing about food and I don't feel like I thank you guys enough for reading this little bit of nonsense.

Upon Mon Mothma’s greeting, Cassian felt Jyn tense next to him and his hand inexplicably found its way to the small of her back. She threw him a sideways glance that he pretended he didn’t see, but noticed at least that she unclenched her fists, which were thankfully nowhere near her blaster. He wasn’t sure he was up to another showdown involving his fake wife and high-powered weapons.

Cassian was standing at attention, even if his left hand was occupied trying to support his mission partner, when Mothma began to speak.

“With your latest findings, your mission has come to a crucial point. We’re here to outline your next course of action, especially with the latest developments.”

Something flickered to life next to her and Davits Draven’s stern visage appeared in hologram form, holding a datapad in his hand. He was almost afraid that Jyn would tense up again, but she merely distributed her weight more evenly on her feet and crossed her arms over her chest, minutely encroaching on his personal space.

“Jyn Erso,” said Draven, his tone dry, “it is a pleasure to finally meet you.”

Her face scrunched up in a frown. “You’ve met me before… sir.”

“Yes,” he replied, “but I have to admit that Gerrera hid your identity well. You are only wanted by the Empire as Liana Hallick, a partisan fighter associated with his rebel cell, having been found as an orphan by him on Onderon. There is no trace anywhere of the child Galen and Lyra Erso left behind… We ourselves having been looking for you… For a long time.”

At this, he felt Jyn balk and he closed his eyes, wishing his superior officer were little subtler. He particularly had known nothing about the Alliance’s search for Jyn, but then he wasn’t the Alliance’s only agent. He could only imagine, though, what they had been planning on doing after getting custody of an Imperial scientist’s child. He had kidnapped people for the cause before, usually adults – Imperial officials, really – to be exchanged for prisoners. But a child was a far more powerful bargaining chip. From what he knew of them, Mothma and Organa might have reservations about such methods, but Draven, the man who trained them, not so much. This, he knew, explained why he had been held by the woman next to him at blaster point that same evening. If she had been led, all her life, to believe that she was in exactly such danger, it was a wonder she hadn’t just up and shot him.

Jyn, for her turned, sneered, even if in her subdued manner.

“I apologize for the inconvenience.”

He had to bite down a smile.

“Well, you’ve proven yourself to be one of our best field agents. Captain Andor has nothing but great things to say about you in his reports.”

Her frown deepened, “who’s Captain Andor?”

Cassian cleared his throat, his hand having long dropped from the small of her back.

“I am.”

She turned to look at him and he watched as she swallowed, silently, feeling him out as if for the first time.

“You have proven yourself capable of serving the rebellion in every possible way, Jyn, and we know the sorts of things we ask of you to sacrifice” said Mothma, her serene manners slightly grating after the evening he and Jyn had just had, “but we now find that you’re useful to us in a more personal manner.”

He put his hand out again, but held himself back from touching the increasingly furious woman next to him.

“My parents are dead. I have not seen or heard anything from them in fifteen years. My only father is Saw Gerrera,” she said, through slightly clenched teeth.

“We have had intelligence from our agents in Jedha. Your source, Rook, has been in touch with Gerrera’s people. He’s saying that he has information for his eyes only. We need you to talk to Gerrera.”

“I thought my involvement with the Alliance was supposed to heal the breach with Saw. What happened?”

Draven’s sigh was audible, even through the holo transmission.

“We continued to have our differences, but that was not the only reason Gerrera volunteered you to our mission.”

Cassian was thankful that Draven had the sensibility not to put into words what Jyn could figure out for herself. Her hands started shaking a little and he found himself yearning to pick them up in his own, as he would if this was some social occasion they were in as Kestrel and Joreth. He found himself feeling protective of her in a way he never had before. This wasn’t part of the mission; they weren’t amongst their enemies here. These were their superior officers in the Rebellion, whose orders they had to obey. Cassian also knew that Jyn didn’t necessarily need his protection. They weren’t running for their lives after an assignment had gone wrong, where she wouldn’t be able to account for everything that was threatening them. This was something else; it had to do with watching her appear in the kitchen bleary eyed and vulnerable after sleep, with memorizing the pattern of her breathing as she lay next to him in bed, with sharing stakeouts with her for hours on end. Neither were prone to talking much, but their silences were always eloquent, he felt.

She didn’t react to what Draven implied, though, and the man saw that as reason enough to keep talking.

“There is one more thing: our agent in Jedha told us that Rook has been saying he was sent specifically by someone within the Imperial weapons program.”

Jyn nodded. “He told me he had a friend who gave him information.”

“Precisely. That _friend_ is your father.”

This time he had to put out a hand to keep Jyn in place because she almost leapt out of her skin, even if to the untrained eye, she had kept almost completely still. Bail Organa looked at him – the first time he saw Cassian Andor instead of Aach, his courier – and then spoke at Jyn.

“Jyn, you said that Saw was your real father. My wife and I adopted my daughter. I know she loves us, but I also know that she wonders about her biological parents. I cannot imagine what must be going through your mind right now, but there is a chance that your father could help us understand what is it that the Empire is building. And you could find out what happened to him and your mother. You and Cassian _have_ to go to Jedha. We want him to testify in the Senate.”

Jyn didn’t react, but she also didn’t say anything. Cassian stepped forward: an order was an order.

“You want us to leave immediately?”

“As soon as you are able,” Draven replied, “you know the protocol for this. Your covers here will be intact and in Jedha you’ll be posing as tourists, interested in pilgrimage to the Holy City. I just transmitted your scandocs, your transport location and what you have to look like.”

He nodded sharply and grabbed Jyn’s arm. She was just quietly eyeing the three people in front of them as she started following him, walking backwards. He didn’t dare say anything on the way back to their ship.

**

The protocol was simple: a family emergency would take them to Joreth’s home planet. They would have to pack, heavily, and drop their ship on Balosar to be taken by another agent, who would drop it on Alderaan. As always, Draven’s people did everything they could to keep Joreth and Kestrel Sward’s identities airtight.

Cassian, however, tried to keep his watchful eye over Jyn as subtle as possible as she folded piles of Kestrel’s sensible clothing and tucked them into a travelling pack. Her eyes were the same indiscernible shade of grays and greens as they always were, focused on her task. Her mouth was set in as a straight line as her full lips allowed. He was used to her being unapproachable but this was a situation he wasn’t sure he had ever seen. Sure, people fighting in the rebellion went missing across the Galaxy all the time and some reappeared. Rarely, though, they survived after being absconded by the Empire, which seemed to be case with Jyn’s father. People who disappeared into the Imperial repression machine’s belly never came out of it alive. He had watched as several of his comrades in vain clung on to hope that their loved ones would appear again, since there was no proof of their demise. It was a special kind of cruelty, Cassian found, which he had had no idea the woman living with him all these years was going through. He had no inkling what he would do if it turned out his parents had been alive after all these years. He also didn’t know of what his state of mind would be if he didn’t have very vivid memories of their deaths, which meant that in a way, he could choose to put them behind him.

On the other hand, he knew that Draven and Alliance intelligence in general didn’t know the exact terms of Galen Erso’s return to the Imperial weapons program. He could have been kept captive, but just as well gone of his own free will. Jyn’s memories were a child’s memory and she appeared to have little information on her parents’ political stance, apart from the fact that they tried to run away when she was small.

“Where did you run away?” He asked, whilst putting a bunch of clean socks in his backpack.

“Hm?” She was biting her lip, seemingly distracted by counting underwear and pairs of trousers for a long journey.

“Your parents. Where did they go when you ran away?”

“Lah’mu,” she answered, still not looking at him.

“That’s…”

“Far away, but lovely in a way. I was happy there.”

He tried not to take that reply as encouragement to pry more.

“I grew up in Fest,” he volunteered.

“I figured,” she said, shrugging.

“Oh?”

“The accent. Everyone would think that was Alderaanian, but it’s not quite the same. I guessed some planet with Alderaanian occupation in the past. Fest fit.”

She was good, he knew, and quieted down any sense of weird pride that he might undeservedly take in this fact.

They were closing the door to their apartment, having dragged their luggage outside, when Krennic walked by. Cassian composed his face in a harried expression, the face of someone who was leaving in a hurry. But it was she that spoke first, her hand falling on his arm in a comforting gesture as he was checking the security codes.

“Orson!” The tone of her voice was loud and Kestrel’s.

“What is all this?” The older man asked, eyeing the backpacks, their casual clothing; jackets, boots, comfortable trousers, more Jyn’s and Cassian’s than Orson Krennic’s neighbors’.

“Joreth’s grandmother is very ill. They don’t think she has much time left,” she said mournfully, her fingers tightening on his bicep, “we’re travelling to Alderaan.”

He shrugged her off, but put a hand on her hair, caressing what tresses were coming loose from the twist it was held up in, giving her a fond and sad smile. Krennic conveyed them his sentiments, wished them a speedy and uneventful journey. Cassian kept his eyes trained on Jyn as she watched their neighbor walk away with an entire new level of tension to her body. She slung her pack over her shoulder and hurried ahead of him, not looking back.

When he came into the cockpit after doing last checks, Jyn was done calculating their coordinates and was sitting quietly in the co-pilot seat, her hand wrapped around something that hung from her neck and which he had never seen before. Her eyes were closed and she was muttering under her breath words that were barely audible. This was also novel to him, but he didn’t dare question her after the night they had just had. She tucked whatever it was she had clutched in her palm into her shirt and shook her head, like she was getting her bearings back.

“All set?”

“Yeah. Tell me when I can just punch it.” 

“Sure thing.”

And then they were off.

He told her it would be a couple hours before they would reach Balosar and told her he would have first watch. Cassian didn’t mention it, but he knew that the evening had taken a toll on her. She refused to go to their cabin, however, opting instead for curling in the seat next to him and stubbornly trying to keep her eyes open. Neither one of them were particularly chatty people when travelling, and this time he refrained from talking just to see if she would give in to sleep. When her breathing became even, he risked a look at her, and saw that she was out like a light. He decided their course was set and the way ahead peaceful enough for him to nod off as well and closed his eyes.

** 

The Wellons were coming from Aria Prime and interested in religious lore. He, Jonnat, was Mantooinian, with a shock-full of longish jet-black hair and a moustache, and his wife, Anaya, was a Core Worlder with wide-eyes and straggly clothes, wearing heaps of cheap jewelry. They met their Balosar contact with eager smiles under tired eyes and after dropping their luggage into a small Corellian ship, settled at the counter of a local cantina to devour some real food. Jonnat figured they should make the most of their time planetside as best as they could before being cooped up for Force knew how long on their way to Jedha, so he shoved a shot glass of something bright and green that had some reputation on the planet towards Anaya.

“You should loosen up,” he mumbled over the music, when she threw him a rather inquisitive look.

She grabbed the glass and knocked back the drink, her features barely changing over what he knew was strong alcohol going down her throat. Her eyes turned mischievous and he instantly felt something course down his spine, some form of dread over his own suggestion that they try and enjoy their allotted time for a meal. He felt his stool start to glide on the floor in her direction, feeling rather than seeing her lower leg tightly curled around it and pulling at it. Despite himself, he made no resistance, and met her liquid brown eyes straight on. Anaya bit her lower lip and leaned on her seat against his shoulder. He was just going to put his arm around her, when two steaming bowls of stew were placed in front of them, along with two mugs of Balosar ale.

She picked up her spoon and started fiddling with the mixture of sausages, pink turnips and bright blue beans in her bowl. He settled to eat his as well, his right arm and leg brushing against her left ones as they blew on the hot food and chewed on in silence.

Anaya pointed to her food with her spoon, mouth still full. “Wanna try mine?”

He finished swallowing, pushing his own bowl in her direction, which contained soft chunks of meat with some gray-yellow leaf he didn’t remember the name of and a species of Balosar plantain he had developed a taste for in the missions he’d been in his teens. She held out a spoon filled with all the ingredients of her stew of choice to him, an intimate gesture, while she scooped the leaves, meat and the orange salty fruit out of his own and shoved it into her own mouth. He tried not to make too much of it. They were, after all, supposed to be married.

By the time they were headed back to their ship, she was acting slightly tipsy, tucked against his side to protect herself from the winds in the spaceport, and he allowed himself to inhale the whiff of Anaya’s hair, suspiciously similar to Kestrel’s back in Coruscant. He thought she was going to break out of Anaya’s slightly flaky personality as soon as they closed off the ship’s boarding ramp, but she was still humming when she walked over to the small ‘fresher, tugging off Anaya’s cumbersome chestnut curls. After he had changed, he walked into the cabin and Jyn was curled on her side of the large bunk they were supposed to share even as they travelled, better to keep their cover if the ship was searched.

He sat down on the edge of it and made out Jyn Erso’s eyes peering at him from under her bangs.

“How about we set off tonight? Get some headway?”

She propped herself on her elbow.

“Sure, let me just put on some trousers and I’ll-“

He waved her down.

“You stay here and rest. I’ll get us underway,” she clenched her teeth and he put a hand on her shoulder, “I accused you of coddling me a couple weeks ago, remember? Well, that was unfair. You’ve had a rough time of it in the last twenty-four hours.”

She relaxed under his hand and nodded, settling back on her pillow. He pulled his hand away and noticed the dark string that rounded her neck and disappeared under her white sleep shirt, something small and solid visible through the fabric, resting at the place just above her breasts. Nevertheless, he refrained again from asking her about it. She opened her mouth a couple of times and he waited for her to get the words out, knowing, after three years of living with this woman that she may be good at deceiving people in all sorts of ways and at putting on all sorts of masks, but that when she herself had to talk, words didn’t come easily to her. He had learned, thanks to his own training, the cartography of her silences, and the small seismic shifts in her shoulders, in her jaw and in her hands when she – who he now knew as Jyn Erso – was reacting to the world and to him. So he tried to prompt her as silently as he could.

“Thanks,” she said softly, “for not doubting me.”

He hoped she knew he was being candid. “We’re in this together. Remember that.”

Jyn nodded, her eyes brimful with something he thought was sorrow and exhaustion, even if she had already slept some on the way from Coruscant. He got up and went to get their ship off the ground, calculate coordinates and get them going. 

Before he arrived at the cockpit, though, a light was blinking on the ship’s communication bay. He put on the headphones and typed in the code that was asked, signaling that it was a private message for him. The order was coded, cryptically so, but for him, clear enough: if they found Galen Erso, he was to be killed. They were not specific about his wife, but Cassian figured she was the least of the Alliance’s worries. Draven explained that if the man was behind such a weapon as was being described, who knew what else he had planned or built to unleash on the Galaxy. For the first time since joining the Alliance, Cassian balked at an order, but as a trained spy, he understood Draven’s rationale of “shoot first, ask questions later”. As far as he knew, the Rebellion was in shambles. Waiting for someone to testify before the Senate seemed to any seasoned fighter such as him and the general a colossal waste of time. At the same time, however, he couldn’t help but think of the woman lying in bed waiting for him to get their ship out of atmo and in hyperspace. 

His hands started trembling a little and he deleted the message, as he was wont to do anyway. He sat down at the commands, taking his time to steady his breathing as he calculated the coordinates to the Mid Rim moon. He wasn’t, however, in any more semblance of calm when the ship broke out of atmo and he punched the hyperdrive into action.

Cassian sluggishly walked back to the cabin, almost reluctantly so, knowing that a night poorly slept on the cockpit wouldn’t be any help when they got to their destination. Jyn was already fast asleep, in the same position he had left her in, but knew that she would wake up at the sign of anything unusual. He quietly undressed down to his underwear and undershirt and climbed into the bunk, struggling to keep the same respectable distance from her as the one they had established back in Joreth and Kestrel’s much larger marriage bed in Coruscant. He finally lay on his back, trying to get his body to relax limb by limb, when he felt Jyn move next to him and tangle one of her legs with his. Something spread on his lower abdomen akin to hot lead and he closed his eyes, muttering a Festian saying that fell somewhere between a curse and a prayer. He peered sideways at her and saw that her eyes were closed, but that she wasn’t really asleep, probably having awoken with her own gesture. Something broke within him then, which he decided to interpret as sympathy for all he learned of her predicament. He lifted his left arm and still feigning sleep, she ambled towards him, resting her head on his shoulder, an arm draping tentatively over his stomach, leaving a trail of fire there that took more than a few seconds to subside.

As Jyn sighed into his side and her breath slowly grew regular again, he felt the pull of sleep. Rather incoherently, although very vividly, he decided that no matter what Draven said, he would only follow the orders he was just given in the most extraordinary of circumstances.


	10. Jedha

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So we're moving into Rogue One territory and I'm a little scared that this might turn a little too predictable. Feedback is always always welcome, since this is the first story I've written and published in forever. I am, though, really humbled by those of you who take your time to comment. You make me want to write more. 
> 
> I'm not very good at the tumblr thing, but come chat over there if you're so inclined. I'm estherlyon there as well.

It was three days. Three days of waking up with her body pressed against Cassian’s steady warmth, of watching his previously shaved jawline grow a stubble that he didn’t bother shaving now that he didn’t have to pose as an Imperial officer. They never acknowledged what happened when they went to sleep in their bunk, all of the ship’s alarms set to the highest volume so none of them lost any sleep. She would get up first, make some caf in the small galley, and heat some of the crusty bread they bought from a market in Balosar before meeting their contact the day they set off. They would read and when not doing that, she would tinker with their blasters; Cassian, for his turn, would play word puzzles on a datapad (something Jyn pretended she didn’t find endearing).

They planned their actions on Jedha down to excruciating details, using a holoprojection of the moon’s surface and of the Holy City itself. She knew, though, that no matter how many contingencies they planned for, that it could be all blown to hell under minutes.

Meanwhile, Jyn was still reeling from the knowledge that at least her father was alive. On one hand, her chest was filled with memories of warm nights on Lah’mu, hearing the man’s rich voice as he talked to her about what made up stars, how the universe and their galaxy were created, and all sorts of miracles that boiled down to chemistry and physics. She recalled a cozy bedroom, filled with toys, of downy blankets and scratchy sheets she complained about to her mother. On the other, though, the feelings of terror when it was all ripped away from her, the hollowness that spread through her chest as she grew into one of Saw Gerrera’s hardended partisans made something twist in her gut and slowly reach its way into her heart. Jyn was thankful for Cassian’s silences, then. She didn’t know, though, if she should attribute them to his understanding of what she was going through or to his confusion over her recent behavior.

Jyn had to admit that she was slightly confused herself. Ever since he had seemingly reached out to her before they went to Balosar, she had started to feel increasingly comfortable reaching back. Whatever it was that was simmering between them before the cumulating information in Coruscant led to their confrontation the night she had learned that Rook had defected still lingered. She couldn’t, however, deal with it in any way. She just stopped, for now, resisting the pull of want she felt whenever he was near, to burrow into his side in sleep and mold her softness over his hard planes. It was to their credit as spies that she managed to hide how affected she was, and that he spent most of the time with his sharp features resting in a neutral expression.

She really shouldn’t dwell on whatever was going on between them at the moment, however. They had a meeting to get ready to. One with an Alliance contact, who would lead them to Saw, her foster father. That was another rabbit hole she did _not_ want to wander down.

When she had arrived at their apartment back Imperial Center from their briefing with Draven, Mothma and Bail Organa, she had run into their ‘fresher and prepared to cry. Nothing but a dry, hollow, soundless scream had burst forth from her lungs, though, as she put a fist to her teeth. Jyn could not believe that Saw not only had used her as some bargaining chip with the Alliance three years previously, but that he had done so because he didn’t want to be encumbered with her and the danger her identity posed. It seemed that Tivik wasn’t full of banthashit, after all. Yes, she owed a lot of who she was to her parents, but the memories of them were fading with time and the ones that she retained were of her childhood with Saw on Ord Mantell and later on Onderon, learning how to take care of herself and to fight for a better Galaxy. Saw had taught her to believe in their fight as much as her mother had ingrained in her a trust in the Force. The presence of that larger than life man, from whom everyone in their cell scoured away from at the sound of a single word out of his mouth had left her feeling protected. She wondered what would have happened if the Alliance _hadn’t_ come with an offer.

Right now, though, she was dealing with those feelings of betrayal much as she had dealt with everything so far, since she was about ten years old: ignoring it and dealing with Saw as part of the mission, just an assignment, some roadblock on the way to survive to fight another day.

Ironically, it was Saw himself who had taught her how to do all that.

Jyn was lying in bed skimming through some more information on Jedha when she heard the alarm indicating they had come out of hyperspace. She heard Cassian stomping on his way to the cockpit, stopping on the way to gesture for her to come along. Tossing the datapad away, she ran after him and slipped into the co-pilot’s seat, looking over their status and coordinates.

“Everything seems okay. In about two hours we should be landing.”

He nodded, quietly.

“You alright up here? I’m going to get into that wig again and start getting ready.”

“All right. I’ll be along in a bit.”

She couldn’t help but land a hand on his shoulder before she went, a slight acknowledgement that their little reprieve was over.

 

**

 

NiJedha was bustling. Teeming markets, people shouting everywhere, all sorts of weird pilgrims and some who seemed the serious sort. The city was also crawling with Stormtroppers and security droids. Anaya was thankful her flowing skirts helped conceal her truncheon and a blaster. She bit into a bright yellow grape-like fruit at a market-stall, which its owner had gallantly allowed her to sample, her large teeth rupturing the skin. She felt juice dribbling down her chin. Before she could wipe it, though, Jonnat’s thumb was there, calloused, and he licked it afterwards, throwing her a dimpled smile. Anaya rolled her eyes.

His mustachioed lips got near her ears, a lover whispering.

“Am I crazy or there’s a star destroyer hovering over a building that way?”

“I see it. You think it’s all for show? Make these people keep their heads down?”

“Could be the crystals. Temple’s that way.”

She nodded, considering the holoprojections of the city she had memorized on their way over.

Their contact had been late and they took their time checking out the fruit stands, eating something other than the mealpacks and stale bread they had survived on for three days. She figured that the three-year mission on Coruscant had left them spoiled for real food. Glancing at her arm loped through Jonnat’s she felt a grimace form at the fact that maybe it wasn’t only the food that she would miss when all this was over.

Then she saw him, a man in a nondescript flight suit, a freighter pilot seemingly on a supply run. He tucked a bit of his longish red hair behind his ear that she knew was as fake as her own chestnut curls and eyed them discreetly. She elbowed Jonnat, he nodded almost imperceptibly and they casually strolled through the stalls, Anaya cataloguing at least another three other kinds of fruit that she would want to eat later on.

“These are wonderful pears,” she remarked conversationally.

The stranger eyed her from behind the red hair that fell over his eyes. He struck her as young - couldn’t be over eighteen – and her stomach lurched in anger at Draven, despite knowing that by that age, she had been in hairier situations under Saw’s command. His pimpled cheeks betrayed no emotions as he surveyed them.

“Yes, they are. I hear you’re looking for something specific, though.”

Hosnian, she thought, maybe a defector from the academy. Jonnat nodded beside her and they followed the young man. When they were in a particularly bustling and apparently stormtrooper-free section of the market, the boy stopped.

“Your contact’s name is Zulia. She’ll be meeting you down at the Temple this afternoon.”

It was mid-morning. It meant they had time to get more of a feel of the city. Something, though, rung familiar in the woman’s name.

“Zulia? Is she with Saw’s people?”

“She’s the sister of a former fighter in his cell.”

“Kriff,” she mumbled.

Jonnat turned inquisitive eyes towards her, but she shook her head as if to mean she would explain later. Of all the people in the world, they would have to beg Tivik’s sister for a meeting with Saw. She knew that the woman had no way of knowing that they were responsible for his demise, but she found herself fearing how her partner would react to that. If the woman knew they were Alliance, she was bound to ask after Tivik.

“Is NiJedha always like this or have them ramped up the occupation?” Jonnat asked.

The boy nodded, eyes on their surroundings, but appearing distracted with something or other on the stall. He picked up a scarf on sale, put it around Anaya’s head with a small smile.

“It gets cold here,” he said by way of explanation and then tilted his head, “it’s been getting hotter, though, in the last few weeks. Gerrera’s people are up to something and the Imps are figuring out where their pilot’s gone.”

He gestured to a holo image of Bodhi Rook on the stall whose keeper he was now paying for the scarf covering Anaya’s hair, but kept talking. “Name’s Tuc, by the way.”

“Anaya and Jonnat,” said Jonnat, tugging Anaya’s scarf more into place, a little protectively, she thought, “but you already knew that, I suppose.”

“Yeah,” Tuc replied, “listen, the scarf’s not the only gift I have for you. But you’ll have to come with me to my ship.”

Both Anaya and Jonnat stopped in their tracks and measured the boy before them. All sorts of alarms were blaring in her head and she felt for her blaster hidden in the pocket of her long dress.

“I know how this sounds, but the man sent it himself. Said you would appreciate seeing a friendly face, Jonnat.”

So it was something from Draven, especially for Jonnat. Anaya eyed her husband with a little caution and saw that where previously his eyebrows had been drawn together, they were now almost up in the middle of his forehead.

“Seriously?”

Tuc shrugged, “I told him it wouldn’t exactly _blend in_ this town, but he said you might need it. With this many Imps walking around, though, I might agree with him.”

She found her hand being grabbed by Jonnat, and as Tuc took his expression to mean an assent, she was practically dragged away from the market stall. She loosened her hold in her blaster but kept her hand in her dress’s pocket, just in case.

It turned out Tuc’s ship was a twenty-minute treck away from the market, in a commercial docking bay. It was a little banged up, but a freighter a little similar to theirs, something that could pass as a private as well as a smuggling ship. She resolutely refused to walk up the ramp, preferring to wait outside to blast her way in to drag Jonnat away if needed. She could care less if the kid thought she was being paranoid. Her husband, however, walked out five minutes later with what passed for a beaming smile on his face, very Jonnat-like, followed by a humungous Imperial KX series security droid who clunked its way down the ramp.

Anaya felt her eyes almost pop out of her sockets. This was Draven’s gift? She thought her husband had finally lost it; it appeared that whatever screws he had left in his head had all come loose at last.

“What the kriff is this thing!?”

Jonnat sobered up, but his amusement was still evident.

“ _Darling_ ,” he simpered although in a warning tone, “this is K-2SO. I reprogrammed him and he was my only mission partner until… Well, _you_ came along.”

“Are you serious?”

“Perfectly serious.”

The droid stopped in front of her. She had to bend her neck back to look directly into its golden eyes and she could swear that though droids were normally devoid of facial expressions, this one definitely despised her.

“She’s positively tiny, _Jonnat._ I cannot believe they thought it wise to leave you just with her for protection.”

“What the hell!”

“Alright, you two. We really don’t need to loiter around Tuc’s ship. Kay, can you get a read on our ship’s location with what I just gave you?”

The thing seemed to sniff. Anaya couldn’t begin to believe this.

“Of course,” it replied.

“Well, then,” Jonnat gestured, “you go along and wait for us there. It would be strange for a couple of pilgrims to be escorted by an Imperial droid.”

“But-“

“Jonnat’s right,” she said, recovering, somewhat, “unless you want to be target practice and blow this mission to bits.”

K-2SO turned its head toward Jonnat and he nodded at it. It walked off after a few more words in private with her husband and she watched as he knocked affectionately on the droid’s chassis before it went on its way.

She was still wrapping her head around what had just happened, when Jonnat took her arm and started escorting her away from Tuc’s ship, saying their goodbyes and thanking him for them both. The boy gave them a contact for a burned comlink they could use, should they run into trouble. Anaya almost laughed outright at that, but after the surprise she just had, she chose not to put anything outside the realm of possibilities.

She didn’t know how right she turned out to be.

 

**

 

“You seem tense all of a sudden.”

Jonnat had his hand on the small of her back, burning a hole through the heavily padded leather jacket she wore over her dress, his fingers digging in.

“Don’t you feel it?”

She nodded. “That this town’s about to blow? Yeah.”

“Well.”

“We have loads of backup plans.”

“I’ll hold you to that.”

They sat down in a small eatery near the Temple, asking their servers about religious lore as they ate a light meal. The Mandalorian man and the Devaronian female mostly humored them, but clearly thought they were lunatics, keeping an eye on the increasing pedestrian movement in the streets.

When they left, the couple closed the door and turned the sign on it so it spelled “closed” in Jedhan and Basic to anyone walking past. Anaya and Jonnat kept playing at being oblivious, but deep down, she felt nervousness starting to bubble up under her skin. She glanced up at Jonnat and his mouth was turned down under his moustache, obviously apprehensive, his dark eyes just a little bit wider.

As they traversed a particular bustling lane under an ancient overpass, two males bumped into her. One of them, a disfigured man, definitely tried to feel her up, probably in an attempt to cause trouble with Jonnat. Despite what she had just tried to convey to her partner, her nerves got the better of her and she shoved him back, training on him fierce eyes that bore no resemblance to the distracted pilgrim she was supposed to be. Jonnat was quick to apologize to them, a protective arm turning her around as she let her face convey her simmering rage.

“We don’t want any trouble – we’re just tourists,” said her husband, sounding befuddled even though she felt his fingers dig into the flesh under her collarbone.

As soon as they were out earshot, she heard him ask her in a harsh whisper what was the matter with her, which she chose to pretend she didn’t hear. He apparently was quick to let it go.

“Anaya, I’m going to see if our guide is already at our meeting point.”

“Fine,” she mumbled sullenly.

She paid attention to where he was going enough that she should know in which direction to run, though, and watching a couple of stormtroopers roughen up a two men against a wall, as she heard someone call out.

“I’ll trade that necklace for a glimpse into your future!

Anaya balked and looked for the source of the comment. A blind man in what looked to be old-fashioned religious robes was sitting alone in a corner of the Temple’s complex. She knew they were Guardians of the Whills, who used to protect the temple in NiJedha before it was stripped of its kyber crystals. Anaya found herself walking in the man’s direction, even though he wasn’t facing her way.

“I’m Chirrut Imwe,” he said when she was close enough.

“How do you know I’m wearing a necklace?”

She knew better than to be talking to him. According to her briefs, these men – she now saw that he had a companion who was the veritable size of a door standing behind him – usually meant trouble now that they didn’t have anything left to guard.

“For that answer you must pay.”

She rolled her eyes, trading a glimpse with his partner.

“What do you know about kyber crystals?” The man called Imwe asked.

She shrugged. “My father used to say they powered Jedi’s lightsabers.”

She was barely finished with her answer when Jonnat grabbed her by the arm.

“Anaya, we have to get going. We don’t have time to make friends.”

She knew that this was supposed to play into her personality, but she found herself gritting her teeth.

“The strongest stars have hearts of kyber!” Exclaimed Imwe, which got in the way of her response.

She tried to ignore the man and focused on Jonnat.

“What’s going on?”

“Zulia isn’t here. And something tells me she’s not coming.”

She took the time, then, to examine their surroundings. The number of ‘troopers was becoming increasingly high. There were armored vehicles now treading the crowded streets, businesses were shutting down their doors, stall vendors packing up their goods and rushing away as fast as they could. Anaya felt a familiar knot form in her stomach, the one she used to get whenever she and the partisans were getting ready for action. She looked up and saw that on the limestone arches what looked like to be a sniper.

When she turned to look at Jonnat, it was with Jyn’s quiet voice that she muttered a curse.

Then a grenade was tossed under one of the armored vehicles and all hell broke loose.


	11. Partisans

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was really hard to write, because I'm not one for writing action sequences. I'm afraid it's a bit clunky.

Cassian woke up in a sandy prison cell – a cave, really, fitted with bars for that purpose. His head hurt where it had been hit with the butt of a blaster rifle even after their captors had hooded them, but otherwise he felt fine, despite not knowing for how long he had blacked out. He was still wearing his clothes, but he had obviously been searched, although as he rifled through the pockets of Jonnat Wellon’s park, he found at least some items that might prove to be useful. A hand at the back of his head to see if the hit had injured his scalp told him that Jonnat’s long hair was gone; his own had been pulled from the trappings of disguise. The same hand felt for Jonnat’s facial hair and indeed, all that was left on his face was his own stubble.

He had felt that things might be heading in this direction when he and Jyn had sat down at that eatery earlier in the day (or yesterday?). She had commented on his nervousness, seeming to be calm herself, but when they ran into the deformed man and the male Aqualish, he had had to contain her, which told him that she had her nerves as under control as he did – that is, barely. Then he had gone to find Zulia and came back empty-handed, which was only logical, given how that the vicinity of the kyber temple was now crawling with Imperials. Jyn, for her turn, had been talking to a couple of guardians of the Whills, for Force knew what reason.

They were assessing the situation when a grenade had exploded under an armored vehicle, starting a shoot-out between partisans and stormtroopers. They had both run for cover, pulling out the blasters they had tucked away under their disguises. As soon as she was behind a stone wall, Jyn had reached down and shed Anaya’s dress off. He hadn’t seen her change when they arrived on Jedha, but somehow he knew that she wasn’t about to walk into a warzone in clothing that wasn’t practical. She bit at something on her wrist and quickly tied Anaya’s long curls away from her face in a bun, muttering curses as she did so. They had no alternative but to shoot their way out this situation.

His heart had especially seized when he had heard a child crying – thinking for a brief second that Mothma and Organa were right to break with Gerrera over his methods – and then it nearly stopped when his foolish, brazen partner ran into fire from both sides, grabbing what he knew saw was a little girl and carrying her over to relative safety. Her real name spilled from his throat as she ran off and handed the child over to a crying, exasperated mother. And despite the surge of angered worry in his heart, he had to admit that he wanted to kiss her senselessly for the action. Jyn had been trying to duck back into cover when he saw that the Imperial tanks were aiming at the buildings around them for maximum damage, and as he shot whoever was manning one of the guns, she took refuge next to that tank, which put her in the line of fire of a partisan on top of an archway about to hurl a grenade towards it. He had no choice but to shoot the man, who fell into the street, setting off an explosion in a market stall. That action, though, turned both him and Jyn into targets of both sides of the conflict.

They had been in dire straits before; assignments in Coruscant where they had come close to being caught – like the night when all this began, when they were almost caught by Coruscanti police as they kidnapped Tivik – but nothing quite like this. Imperial Center, after all, wasn’t a war zone, for all its being the capital of the Empire. So it was the first time, really, that despite Cassian’s intellectual understanding that him and Jyn could end up in an Imperial prison and, therefore, dead, that the situation of watching Jyn die presented itself to him. He didn’t quite have the time to appreciate all the sorts of different feelings this elicited in him, though, as Jyn looked at him from behind cover and he slowly nodded at her as if to tell her that he would be right behind her should she run. She did, shooting a ‘trooper in the stomach as she did so.

Someone behind them tossed another grenade under yet another armored vehicle and as he reached Jyn, she broke her run to toss him towards the ground before the explosion hit. She fell on top of him, her body pushing into his with each gasp she let out as she struggled to breathe. Anaya Wellon’s curls were escaping her bun and brushing against his face.

“Alright?” She asked him, her voice raspy and her lips brushing his ear.

He nodded, moving his head between her body and his arms, which had braced his fall.

They picked themselves up and ran into what looked like an abandoned building just as an AT-ST walker started shooting its way into the fray. As he ran for cover, though, he met a ‘trooper, who he shot, giving way, in its turn, to another set of armored men. He ran back where he came from, briefly yelling for Jyn to follow him. She didn’t. Just as he was busy taking on the ‘troopers coming up behind them, he heard first rather than saw that she was taking one of them down with her truncheon. Cassian turned around to cover her, but found that he didn’t need to and instead stood, looking pretty much like what he suspected was an idiot, as his tiny wife practically beat the kiff of at least two people wearing heavy armor. She finished another two of them with her blaster and a last one with her truncheon before turning around and shooting down a security droid identical to K-2SO.

K-2SO himself, then, appeared from behind the fallen droid as it keeled over. Cassian was too busy to feel exasperated.

“Did you know that wasn’t me?” The droid asked of Jyn, as she looked at first mortified and then relieved.

“’Course!”

He could have laughed, because this was in no way the trained lies he was used to watch her giving other people.

“I thought I told you to go our ship,” he found himself saying.

“You did, but _I_ thought that was a stupid suggestion and you were in trouble; too many explosions for two people blending in. But what do I know?”

As K-2 talked, he grabbed a grenade tossed in their direction and, heeding Jyn’s frantic warnings for him to turn around, depleted a group of ‘troopers that were creeping behind them by throwing it over his shoulder.

What had looked like a reprieve, though, had quickly turned into Imperial capture – the way out of which Kay had botched spectacularly – followed just as fast by them being saved by the couple of guardians of the Whills. The blind one fought like the stories he had heard of the Jedi as a child in the Rebellion. The hulking man that accompanied him had blasted about half a dozen ‘troopers at the same time with a repeater canon that he carried on his back. As positive as that outcome had been, however, they were, in a matter of seconds, surrounded by Saw’s people. Thankfully, he had sent K-2 away to their ship for a second time.

It was just as well, he had thought, as he was brought down to his knees: they were going to try and meet these people anyway and he doubted they would have been any more welcoming than this. Jyn had decided that then had been the right moment to break cover and declare for all that would hear that she was the daughter of Galen Erso and that whoever hurt her, her husband and their friends would have to deal with Saw Gerrera.

 

**

 

And that was how he turned out to be lying face down in a cell, his face partially covered with sand. Not, though, alone as he initially thought.

“The girl said he was her husband.”

It was the one called Imwe, sounding way too smug for his own good. 

“The man said he isn’t,” was the gruff reply.

“What does _he_ know?”

“Didn’t they say she was the man’s foster child?”

The blind man snorted.

“I say they’re evidently married. One can tell these things.”

“Oh, is the Force telling you?”

Cassian began to think that he was definitely concussed. He sat up, blinking at the two men across from him in the cell.

“Where’s Jyn?”

The question burst out of his mouth before he could stop himself.

“I told you.”

The larger man just grunted.

“She’s with Gerrera,” the blind man replied.

He didn’t know whether to feel desperate or relieved. He peered out of the bars of the cell, but couldn’t see much: mostly just partisans milling around, gambling, and talking quietly in corners. He reached for his pocket and started pulling out his pickset to hack into the panel holding the cell closed, ignoring the two men with him, who continued to argue, now about the use of prayer to get them out of their current predicament.

“I currently think that the Force and I have different priorities,” he offered, talking around the picks he held in his mouth, while he fumbled with his pockets.

Before the blind man – Imwe – could reply, he heard scuffling outside their cell and what was clearly Jyn’s voice, yelling at someone.

“You put him where!?”

It sounded like a droid walking, but the voice that followed was human, a man’s; it was the voice of someone who had lived through way too much in their life.

“He’s Alliance.”

“ _I’m_ Alliance. You made sure of that!”

“I couldn’t risk the survival of our fight! People were already talking about who you might be.” 

“You made your choice. You handed me over to the Alliance. He’s my husband and you’ll get him out of that cell. If he went through half of what you’ve done to Bodhi, I’ll personally mangle you, Saw.”

At this, Chirrut Imwe turned a bright grin in his partner’s general direction. Cassian rolled his eyes. For all their ability to fight, the two guardians were behaving more like the gossipy old women he remembered from his native Festian village. He must have appeared nervous, because Imwe turned intent on offering him some measure of comfort.

“Relax, Captain. We’ve been in worse cages than this one.”

“This is a first for me,” he replied dryly.

“There is more than one type of prison, Captain. I sense that you carry yours wherever you go.”

Not only that remark befuddled him for hitting too close to home, but also Cassian realized that he had never mentioned his military rank to this man.

He was kept from replying when something – or rather – someone came barreling towards their cell, though, and for a while he was slightly confused. This woman was wearing Jyn’s trousers, Anaya’s jacket and boots, and the scarf Tuc had bought her wrapped over her neck and shoulders. Unlike him, she was armed to her teeth, which spoke of the favor she was in with the partisan’s cell leader. Her hair was nowhere near the soft tumble of Kestrel Sward’s practical and neat hairdo, but haphazardly tied in a messy bun and her eyes were lined with kohl. She was a partisan through and through and Cassian wondered how long exactly he had been unconscious in that cell.

“Cassian,” she said, not an exclamation, but just something that tumbled out of her lips when she saw him.

Jyn reached through the bars and he was quizzically staring at what he thought was going to be a gratuitous display of sentimentality, but jumped back as she instead quickly plucked the lock picks from his fingers and proceeded to hack into the cell door panel herself. When the bars lifted, Jyn took his face in her hands, looking searchingly into his eyes, her thumbs brushing his cheekbones, her fingers pressing at the sides of his head. He found himself slightly stupefied yet again.

“What did they do to you?” She asked, her voice urgent.

He frowned. “Hit me on the head. I was out for a while.”

She sagged with relief and before he could say anything else (this was becoming vexing), pressed her lips to his. It was too quick, nothing that they hadn’t done before, but their covers had now been blown for a while: for all intents and purposes they were Cassian Andor and Jyn Erso, Alliance Intelligence officers assigned on a mission. That was it. Then he realized that at the moment of her capture and to her foster father – at whom she had appeared to be yelling moments before – she had repeatedly said he was her husband. It made sense if she was trying to protect him as well.

“You alright, then?” She had moved her hands to the hood of his parka over each of his shoulders.

He nodded. “Yeah, yeah…”

“Saw says there’s something for me to see, but I said I’d see it only if you were with me.”

 

**

 

Ever since he had come into the rebellion, a little angry child of six, Cassian’s head had been filled with stories of Saw Gerrera, the man who had given and risked so much for the cause he was even part machine, bits and pieces put together so he could live to fight another day. Therefore, Cassian couldn’t help but feel awkward, as Jyn held him by the sleeve of his parka as she introduced him to the man with a defiant little jut in her chin that told him just how much she thought of the old partisan as a parent. 

The man had appraised him and nodded curtly, seeing something in him that garnered his approval and that Cassian, for his turn, didn’t know what it was. They had been led to an empty room in the complex of caves in which the partisans hid outside of NiJedha. On the floor there was a holo projector, in front of a round wall in which showed that despite his being unconscious, it was still day outside.

Apparently, Saw and Jyn had already hashed out whatever differences they had and had been yelling about in the corridor leading to the prisoners’ cells. He had told Chirrut Imwe and the man who introduced himself as Baze Malbus that him and Jyn would argue for their freedom with Gerrera and that they should stay put, even though the cell door had been hacked open.

“Did you find Rook?” He asked Jyn, as Saw walked off for a brief second to seal the room they were in.

“Yes,” she said, grinding her teeth, “in pretty bad shape. I’ll tell you about it later.”

He just nodded, putting a hand on her arm, squeezing it in reassurance. She flashed him a small smile.

Saw’s mechanical leg made all sorts of pneumatic noises as it came to a stop in front of them. He took a whiff from an oxygen mask attached to the heavy breastplate he wore.

“This is what Rook brought me. It’s a message from your father, Jynnie.”

A holo projection filled the room, its sender turned away from them. As he began to speak, Jyn, upon hearing her father’s voice, started to walk to stand in front of his projection and Cassian followed, a hand on the small of her back.

It was the same man Cassian had seen in the holofilms back at the university library in Coruscant, except this time Galen Erso was far from the jovial man talking about sustainable energy, joking with his wife and holding his small child in his arms. He was haggard, wearing an Imperial uniform and despite the projection’s grainy image, he could see the man’s hair was mostly turned to white. Cassian instinctively moved the hand that had been on Jyn’s back to her arm, risking a brief glimpse at her face. Her eyes were wide with wonder at the sight of her father, her irises the same color of the projection. They started to grow watery with every word her father was saying.

_“… though I don’t dare hope for too much, a chance for Jyn, if she’s alive, if you can possibly find her, to let her know that my love for her has never faded and how desperately I’ve missed her.”_

Before he knew what he had done, Cassian realized that his entire arm was now across Jyn’s shoulders as Galen Erso spoke, tucking her against his side. She was stiff in his hold, ignoring him as she absorbed every second of the message.

_“Jyn, my stardust, I can’t imagine what you think of me. When I was taken I faced some bitter truths. I was told that soon Krennic would have you as well. As time went by I knew that you either dead or so well hidden that nobody would ever find you. I knew that if I refused to work, if I took my own life, it would only be a matter of time before Krennic realized he no longer needed me to complete the project. So I did the one thing no one expected: I lied. I learned to lie, played at the part of the man beaten down resigned to the sanctuary of his work. I made myself indispensable and all the while, I laid the groundwork of my revenge. We call it the Death Star.”_

If Jyn was already having some difficulty breathing, he found that he couldn’t keep his expression blank at the confirmation of what they had been fearing since Tivik’s blubbering intel started to make sense.

Erso continued speaking in his recording, _“there’s no better name and the day is coming soon when it will be unleashed. I’ve placed a weakness deep within the system. A flaw so small and powerful they will never find it.”_

The image flickered and Erso’s tone became urgent.

 _“Jyn, Jyn if you’re listening, my beloved, so much of my life has been wasted. I try to think of you only in the moments when I’m strong because the pain of not having you with me – your mother – our family – the pain of that loss is so overwhelming, I risk failing even now. It’s just so hard not to think of you”_ , the woman in Cassian’s arms began to cry in earnest, but he kept still, waiting until the message was over, _“to think of where you are, my stardust.”_

He risked a glance at Gerrera and saw that the old fighter was almost as discomfited as Jyn was. Erso’s voice sobered.

_“So, the reactor module. That’s the key. That’s the place where I laid my trap. It’s well hidden and unstable. One blast to any part of it will destroy the entire station. You will need the plans, the structural plans for the Death Star to find the reactor. I know there’s a complete engineering archive in the data vault at the citadel tower in Scarif. Any pressurized explosion to the reactor module will set off a chain reaction that will destroy the entire station.”_

The message cut off and Jyn buckled in his arms towards the floor, his hold on her the only think that kept her from falling to her knees. Cassian ignored the fact that Gerrera was with them and buried his nose in her hair, muttering he didn’t even know what so that she knew that she wasn’t alone. He started to feel, though, that the ground was shaking and that chunks of rock were starting to fall over them. His mind was in such disarray, between the information they were just given and the fact that Jyn was reeling from her father’s message, that he couldn’t recall if he had read anywhere if Jedha was given to seismic events. He looked out of the round viewport in the room and saw the surreal sight of the whole NiJedha blowing apart, rock and fire bursting into the sky like a blooming flower. That could only mean one thing.

“Something’s happening, Jyn.” He refused to tell her what he thought he was witnessing. “The caves are crumbling. We have to get out of here. Do you have a comlink?”

She was staring at the holoprojector on the floor, her chest heaving, eyes wide open but unseeing even as she stood in his arms. He had never seen her like this before and he looked at Gerrera for assistance, but the man was just watching their surroundings crumble with some sort of wonder on his face.

He grabbed Jyn and searched her pockets, not even bothering with how intrusive this action was. He finally found a transmitter and pretty much barked into it.

“K-2! K-2, where are you?”

“There you are! I’m standing by as you requested, although there’s a problem on the horizon…” the droid replied, his tone slightly frazzled, “there’s no horizon.”

“Locate our position. Bring that ship here _now_!”

He turned off the comlink and tossed it in his own pocket. Jyn seemed slightly recovered as she heard him and started mumbling something. He grabbed her tear-stricken face and searched her eyes, much as she had done to him before, both their faces increasingly dirty with the soot falling around them. He was about to urge her that they _had_ to go when she spoke.

“Bodhi. We need to get Bodhi. He knows where my father is.”

“Where is he?”

Imwe and Malbus then burst into the room, both carrying their weapons. Malbus tossed Cassian his backpack, which he caught as Jyn disentangled herself from him to go in search of the pilot, he presumed. Gerrera seemed oblivious to the intrusion, instead busy staring him down, and he almost laughed at the absurdity of this man acting like he was inspecting a prospective son-in-law as his headquarters disintegrated around them, not to mention the fact that from what he could tell now, Gerrera apparently had given away the woman he thought of as his own child to some of the people he least seemed to trust.

“Come with us,” Cassian found himself saying, “you can continue to fight. Make it up to Jyn as well.”

The man smiled sadly, gesturing to the expanse of his semi-mechanical body, “there’s not much of me left. You go. Keep Jyn safe. It’s what I’ve always tried to do.”

“She doesn’t need me to keep her safe,” he replied, balking at the notion, “she’s pretty capable of taking care of herself.”

Gerrera took a drag from his oxygen mask, blinking as he barely dodged the stones falling from his ceiling.

“Save the rebellion, then. Save our dream. It probably was your parents’ as well.”

Cassian could have decked the man for speaking of things he knew nothing about (or did he?), but he had other pressing issues at hand.

He started to move to look for a way out of the partisans’ hide-out when Jyn joined him in the corridor, a far-cry from the shell of a woman she had been barely seconds before. She grabbed his sleeve, followed by a harried-looking young man, equally dirty with soot and still wearing an Imperial uniform, and tugged him down a corridor. The three of them followed the flow of desperate fighters fleeing the rapidly collapsing caves. Outside, they found his cellmates seemingly staring at the rapidly approaching wave of rock and sand hurtling in their direction, just as his ship came into view, looking positively tiny amidst the destruction. They ran towards the ship and it didn’t even touch the ground as it opened it had its cargo bay door open for them to scramble inside. 

The last to get in, Cassian practically clambered to the cockpit, yelling for K-2SO to get them out of there, to just punch it.

“I’m not very optimistic about our odds,” the droid said from the pilot seat.

He had missed his friend.

“Let’s not, Kay!”

The droid maneuvered the ship away from the wave of rubble, trying to get it as fast as it could. He started to punch his helm as the exploding debris started curling over their viewport.

“Punch it.” He told K-2 through clenched teeth.

“I haven’t completed my calculations,” the droid replied.

“I’ll make them for you,” he said, as he exasperatedly started punching at the commands around the hyperdrive lever in the ceiling above them.

He pushed the lever and streaks of light surrounded them. With a burst of speed, they were finally out of the explosion’s reach.


	12. Jynnie

Saw Gerrera was dead. Galen Erso was alive. The certainties Jyn Erso had grown up with were suddenly turned upside down and she found she could do little but sit back and watch as part of the moon she had just left her foster father on had its atmosphere punctured by an explosion of unforeseen proportions, so much that other parts of its surface now displayed lightening and thunder she could see from above.

Jyn wiped at the corner of her left eye and saw that her finger became dirty with kohl. She had to stifle a laugh. This had been for Saw’s benefit, when his men had brought them in. He had been adamant that it was all a trap and she had pulled her wig out, told him she was back home, that she just wanted some water and access to what passed for a ‘fresher, as well as an opportunity to become his daughter again. She didn’t mention Cassian, much less the others, and later, when she found Bodhi Rook, his expression dulled and the light in his large eyes lost to what she instantly knew was Bor Gullet’s work, she had lost it.

She had yelled at him; screamed his ears off that the Alliance had been right about him. That Rook had been one of her sources in Imperial Center and Force knew what idiotic line of thinking had made him go looking for Saw, evidently a dangerous lunatic. Saw had pried her off Rook - after she had managed to ask him from where he had fled - told her she could go walk her rage off and that someone named Tanya would help her with what she needed. Tanya turned to out to be a lanky girl with freckled knees, arms, and cheeks who looked not a day over sixteen, which meant, in guerrilla fighting, that she was probably twelve or thirteen. Jyn had silently fumed at men like Draven and Saw when she looked self-consciously at the lines around her mouth on a looking glass as she spread the powdery substance the girl lent her over her eyelids; if they were going to hike their way back to their ship, she was going to need more protection from the sun.

Jyn was seized suddenly with the fear of what Saw could be putting Cassian through, if he had doubted even her. The Bor Gullet was only one of the methods he had at hand to deal with potential informers. She marched back to Saw’s war room, daring the partisans to look her way as she confronted the man who had raised her into a soldier.

He saw that she was still angry, but seemed pleased to see her out of disguise.

“Where’s my husband?”

His nostrils flared, his eyes narrowed to slits. “Whoever he is, he’s not your husband.”

Jyn could play at this game. She even felt her features mimicking his.

“Yes, he is. We’ve been married for the past three years and if you care for me as you always implied you did, you bring him to me right now.”

“Were you sent here to kill me?”

_“What?”_

“Is this all a trap? The pilot-”

“For Force’s sake! Where’s Cassian?”  

“Answer me, Jyn!”

She took a long breath. Just yelling wasn’t going to do the trick. She knew this man.

“The pilot was sent to you by my father. I suspect that’s the only kriffing reason he would come after you. The Alliance asked me to help them find him, to arrange an introduction to you. The information he has is vital to the rebellion and you just ran his brains through the equivalent of a food processor-“

“Oh, so you’re Alliance now?”

She should have known she would play right into his insecurities (she marveled, for a while, that Saw Gerrera had insecurities, but this was what this was all about, wasn’t it?).

“Shavit, Saw. I don’t care what sort of spat you got into with Draven or Mothma or Organa or even Riekaan. This thing blows planets up and you’re asking if Rook is a trap? You set Bor Gullet loose on him and that wasn’t enough?”

Saw closed his eyes, grabbed his oxygen mask, took a pull from it. His hair was long now, white rather than the black she had seen grow on his head the years after she was found by him, his bald head shining over that hatch on Lah’mu. He had already had that chest-plate, already walked with a mechanical leg. Nevertheless, she had never seen him as tired, as haggard as he now seemed.

“He’s in one of the cells, at the prisoner’s wing.”

“You put him _where!?”_

She was walking now, as she spoke, out of the war room and into a maze of corridors in the cave complex. Saw noisily followed her. She felt fourteen again.

“He’s Alliance,” he said matter-of-factly.

She stopped. Threw her hands up in exasperation. “ _I’m_ Alliance. You made sure of that!”

“I couldn’t risk the survival of our fight! People were already talking about who you might be.”

“You made your choice. You handed me over to the Alliance. He’s my husband and you’ll get him out of that cell. If he went through half of what you’ve done to Bodhi, I’ll personally mangle you, Saw.”

He had grabbed her arm, then, and pulled her into an alcove far away from his fighters’ ears. He told her that Bodhi had brought a message with him – a holo –, which he had to show her. She nodded, bit down on her lip and decided something that she would later realize would probably save their mission:

“Cassian has to see it, too.”

“Jynnie-“

“I’ve been with the Alliance for five years, Saw. They’ve taken care of me. They have _no reason_ to want to betray you now – not when so much is at stake. I’ll only see what you have to show me if Cassian’s with me.”

The older man huffed and silently nodded, opening his hand and releasing her arm.

Then she had scrambled over to the corridor where she presumed Saw had established some sort of cell block and found Cassian – conscious, a little bit dazed, but conscious. She was so relieved; she even felt her blood flowing easier through her veins, the tension she didn’t know was there fleeing her shoulders.

And then, after her own private world had shattered, the actual world she was started collapsing as well.

 

**

 

Everyone was silent on the ship. Bodhi was in a corner, like some scared little animal. The guardians of the Whills were grieving the loss of their home. K2-SO was strapped in the pilot seat, focused on piloting. And Cassian was in the communications bay, earphones on his head, his face grave as he made their report. Jyn was too tired, her reality felt entirely tilted. He looked at her, his face lined with dirt, with fresh stubble her fingers twitched at the sight of, but his expression was indiscernible. She remembered his arms around her as they watched her father speak, his nose in her hair and her neck as she felt the world falling from under her. She approached him, tugged the earphones back from his head and he seemed to startle a bit. Jyn kept her hands on the earphones, on each side of his neck.

“Eadu, remember? Krennic was stationed on Eadu. That was where Bodhi defected. That’s where my father is.”

He nodded, swallowed, kept his chin close to his chest as he looked at her from under her lashes.

“Kay,” he called to the annoying droid she supposed she now owed her life to, only barely turning his face away from hers, “set course for Eadu.”

She let go of the earphones and decided that there was something more urgent she had to take care of, as Cassian moved again into the cockpit.

Jyn moved to the galley and saw that they had enough supplies to last them almost a week in hyperspace, since they were about to cross the Galaxy. She pulled enough mealpacks to get ready for the five of them and moved to look into their medkit for tranquilizers, painkillers, enough bacta wipes. She then crouched in front of Bodhi, taking his fidgeting hands in hers.

“Bodhi,” she said, trying to keep his eyes focused on hers, “pay attention to my voice. Do you remember me?”

He shook his head, as if to snap out of something.

“Kaya?”

“Yes, Kaya.”

“B-but…”

“You knew I was wearing a disguise then. You knew I was Alliance. You realized it before I even told you. Different hair, different clothes, different eyes, but the voice is the same.”

“You’re Galen’s- You’re Jyn.“

She closed her eyes. Only his calling her father by his first name and knowing hers explained why he had foregone their arrangement to fly into Saw’s cadre with the message. It sounded like loyalty.

“Yes, that too.”

“I thought it was the Bor Gullet; why I was getting you two mixed up.”

She smiled, wiped at a bit of the dirt on his face, even as she muttered a curse at her late foster father. “No, no. You were right.”

He smiled, a small, fluttering thing. “Galaxy’s that small, huh?”

When he spoke, she ran a diagnostic mental list that would make any B1 unit proud.

She snorted. “I suppose.”

She got up, wiped her hands on her trousers.

“We’re going to get some food into you. I can tell you’re dehydrated and that you’ve had nothing to eat for days. But first: there’s a sonic ‘fresher you can use and I can get your clothes clean, if you don’t mind borrowing Cassian’s for a bit.” He looked panicked. “No? Alright. I’ll do my best to get the dust out of your uniform while you’re in there. Then you’re going to eat and I’m going to give you some medicine.”

He started fidgeting a bit, as if uncertain.

“Listen, Bodhi. You need to sleep and I’ll make sure you have no dreams, no nightmares. We’ll knock you out so you can rest. That’s all you need right now.”

He nodded, his large eyes conveying gratitude, and she offered her hand so she could pull him from the ship’s floor.

Later, as the five of them ate, spread around the ship’s main hold, she got to know Chirrut and Baze Malbus better. On face with the men’s and his own grief over Jedha, Bodhi broke the silence that had taken over the room.

“Galen he said I could do right by myself. He said I could make it right, if I was brave enough and listened to what was in my heart. Do something about it,” his voice broke, “guess it was too late.”

Jyn, worried about his state of mind, found herself pushing words out of her mouth.

“It wasn’t too late.”

“It seems pretty late to me,” mumbled Baze from his corner where Chirrut and him were munching on their meals.

“No. We can beat the people who did this. I’ve seen my father’s message. So has Cassian. We’re going to get him and he’s going to testify in the Senate about that thing. It’s called the Death Star and there’s a way to defeat it.”

Cassian looked at her, his features still darkened with Jedha’s dust, and he turned his face sideways a little bit, keeping his eyes trained on her: a warning not to say too much. She bit her lower lip and took Bodhi’s empty food bowl, squeezing his knee.

“More?” She asked.

“No,” he replied, his voice husky over the ship’s noise, “thanks.”

After they were done, Malbus started clearing their dishes to the galley and Jyn took Bodhi to one of the crew cabins, medkit under her arm. She told him to lie down on one of the cots as comfortably as he could, and when she ascertained he was ready, gave him a shot of a sedative and a muscle relaxant. After a few seconds, she noticed that Bodhi’s limbs became pliant, and she attached a monitor to his finger that would send a warning to one of the ship’s computers should his status change. His heartbeat was regular, his breathing for once only just a soft snore. She risked a look at his face and finally saw something of the young pilot she had spent a couple of nights playing sabacc and joking around with, back on Coruscant. A bit of the guilt she had been carrying over his wellbeing on account with her association with Saw Gerrera seemed to lift from her shoulders.

For the first since getting back to the ship, she made her way to her and Cassian’s cabin. She had made the bed the day they had dropped out of hyperspace before arriving on Jedha, packed up their belongings and put out a few outfits that could be considered Jonnat and Anaya’s in the bureau next to the bed. That seemed ages ago. The day began to take its toll on her and she felt slightly dizzy on her feet as she tucked clothes out of her backpack that didn’t fit someone else’s personality.

Cassian walked up behind her, then, his eyes careful and his mouth in a thin line.

“I got the guardians settled in the other cabin. We’ll have to keep sleeping here... Good job with Rook. He’s out like a light and his status is regular. Kay is at the helm.” He uneasily glimpsed at his bed. “We should get some rest.”

Jyn nodded curtly, not quite knowing how to deal with him; it seemed all the softness that had been there before they got to Jedha was gone. They took turns in the ‘fresher, so she was settled in bed in her own night clothes, already fighting back sleep by the time he got back. It had been too abrupt, breaking cover, and she didn’t quite know how to transition back from being someone who hid that she was fighting a war. He settled next to her, his body rigid, staring at the ceiling, in a way that reminded her of the first times they shared a bed, three years before.

She turned on her side, facing him, and stared at the sharp curve of his jawbone, its slope gentler now that it was hidden under his beard. He had his eyes closed and though she knew that he was aware that she was looking at him – Cassian would never not be –, she traced the shape of his eyelids with her own eyes.

“Are you alright?” He asked, his voice barely a whisper.

Yes, she had looked over Jedha after they broke atmo and seen the destruction there, felt it in her bones more than just in the physical sense. She had also intellectually appraised the changes wreaked in her life that afternoon. She hadn’t stopped to dwell on it, though, as they had fled the moon, as she had patched up Bodhi, made sure they were fed, tried to inspire some semblance of hope in the four men she was sharing their ship with.

“I don’t know,” she mumbled.

He lifted his arm and she almost automatically slid underneath it, just as she had done earlier, while they listened to her father’s message. Much like she had done in the days they had spent travelling, always silently, never talking about it. Jyn risked a glance up at him and saw that he still had his eyes closed. She reached up, then, and mouthed at his jaw, trying to get him to relax under the weight of her hand. And then – then he blew her mind out of the sky. He turned his head and gently, ever so gently kissed her lips. This was not Joreth, her husband, the Alliance agent posing as an Imperial lieutenant. This was the wrecked man she had been sharing her life with, who had started to want to open up to her despite her reluctance, the same man she had found with his head in his hands every time he had had to do something he wasn’t proud of. Jyn was about to chase his mouth, like he had done that one morning in their kitchen in front of Krennic, but Cassian pulled back, touched his lips instead to her forehead.

She returned the favor by kissing his shoulder.

Jyn found herself about to thank him for being there with her when she had seen the holo message, but she figured he knew what she was feeling, that he could probably guess how much it had meant.

She closed her eyes and found her escape in sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just really wanted to wrap Bodhi in a blanket and let him sleep.


	13. Eadu

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hopefully this isn't as clunky as I think it is. Thanks for reading, everyone. If you want to yell at me, I'm estherlyon on tumblr.

He could at least say that he had _tried_ to maintain some semblance of distance from his partner. She, however, had decided to shed something of those walls of hers, to let something chip at the veneer of her stubborn professionalism, and had become, ever since they had boarded their ship to Jedha, a version of herself a little less likely to bolt away from him or threaten him with a knife should he come any closer. That would be a good thing, he thought, and Cassian Andor hadn’t been dealt many good things in his life. However, his orders from Draven still stood, despite the fact that his agents were both witnesses to a message from their mission target saying that he could help the rebellion. Draven’s reply was that they needed more material evidence and there was little chance of that turning up. He had argued for an extraction, but Draven had countered that they couldn’t afford to waste time; Jedha’s destruction, as reported by Cassian himself, was proof enough of that.

He had been sent to assassinate someone for the first time in his life when he was seventeen; at that point he had already proven himself an expert marksman and the number of Alliance agents at Draven’s disposal was wearing thin. Cassian was sent to Coronet, to target a weapons dealer who had given away another agent to Imperial authorities. He had chosen to target the man in his own home, which had a better perimeter for Cassian to flee the scene. What he didn’t count on was that at the minute that he shot the man in his living room, a young man – looking to be Cassian’s age – walked into the room and witnessed his father dying from a blaster burn to his chest. In Cassian’s head, for w few seconds it all configured itself in this surreal game of mirrors: his father had been killed by the Republic forces that later adhered to the Empire; now, as part of the Alliance, he took the life from someone else’s father, probably sending that young man into the Empire’s arms. As horrible as it might seem, the other times he killed people loyal to the Empire, people about to betray them, contacts that threatened him like Zayz had or even Alliance agents who had been captured, hadn’t affected him as much as that one single episode in his youth. Now, what he had done that day haunted him twice as much: he had been asked by the man who trained him, one of the few people who trusted him in this galaxy, to do the same to the woman who had been sharing his bed for the past three years.

And to do this _now_ , when she was suddenly given to stolen tender touches from which he couldn’t seem to gather his wits to refrain from.

Considering their day on Jedha and their fleeing from the city’s destruction, he supposed he had shown considerable restraint. It hadn’t been easy dealing with her worried eyes and prying hands at Saw’s, and then after everything that had happened, with trivial things like her holding onto the earphones around his neck as they spoke. It had been too tempting to take a step forward and capture her lips in his, guardians of the Whills and Bodhi Rook be damned. That same night, when she had scorched his jaw with her open mouth and her large teeth, he hadn’t been able to help himself.

He hadn’t had his life turned upside down like Jyn had, but the whole experience of being with her through it – and then seeing an entire city blown up from under their feet, he supposed – had left him feeling scrubbed raw.

Which was why when he woke up three hours later, he disentangled himself from Jyn’s limbs as gingerly as possible not to jostle her, despite the temptation to stay where he was, with her face pressed against his neck and her fingers splayed out on his chest. He worried for a second that she had taken some of what she had given to Bodhi. Jyn was as light a sleeper as he was and she didn’t seem to wake up with his moving, only mumbled something and further burrowed herself into the excuse for a blanket they had on board.

He pulled a vest over his sleep shirt, his fatigues over his shorts and walked into the cockpit still munching on toothpaste.

“Nothing to report,” said K-2SO in a bored voice.

“Did you power down at some point?”

“No, just managed to get some of the sand off my joints.”

He couldn’t hold back a smile at that.

“I missed you, Kay.”

“From what I’ve seen of your interactions with your new partner, I wouldn’t have guessed it.”

In any other scenario, this entire scene would have been surreal to him: a droid seemingly jealous of the relationship between a man and a woman was something unheard of. However, he had been the one to reprogram K-2 and from then on, he and the droid had been inseparable until the fateful evening where Draven had ordered him alone to the MC90 star cruiser he had met Kestrel Dawn, the prickly, beautiful woman he was supposed to be married to.

“I would have thought that if I behaved in the same way to you, you would have found it repellent,” he said teasingly.

“Not repellent,” replied the droid, turning its golden eyes on him, “just nonsensical.”

“We’re people, Kay. People develop bonds and Jyn and I have been in a mission together for over three standard years. You don’t need to be jealous. If I could have you with me, you have been there.”

“It is impossible for me to feel jealousy, as you well know. You are aware that droids don’t have feelings. I am merely marveling at my replacement for something as feeble as a tiny human.”

He laughed, something he had always found easier to do around K-2.

“She may be tiny, but she knows how to fight,” at this K-2 actually scoffed and he found he had to be stern, “she’s a friend, Kay, and you’ll be watching her back as well as mine on this mission. You understand?”

“Is that an order?” The droid asked carefully and Cassian’s blackened heart always broke a little bit at the thought that K-2 still thought that he would treat him as others did their droids.

“No, Kay. A favor. For me.”

K-2 silently nodded his assent. They had been sitting in companionable silence in the cockpit when Jyn emerged from their cabin, her bangs a halo around her round face and her large eyes still misted with sleep. She peered at them mutely and K-2 turned slightly to face her.

“Cassian says you are a friend. I will not kill you.”

She blinked a little bit more awake, her brows pinched.

“Thanks. Caf?”

“I don’t actually drink anything. Droid, you see?” K-2 said condescendingly.

Jyn looked peeved and Cassian had a hunch it wasn’t from lack of caffeine. He moved to get out of the co-pilot seat.

“I haven’t had any yet. Could make some, if you want.”

“No, I’m on it,” Jyn replied, “Bodhi okay?”

She had asked Cassian, but who jumped with the information was K-2.

“His status is regular; no disturbances while you were both resting. I suppose you might want to let him sleep a cycle of 12 hours.”

“Yes,” she said, slightly appeased by K-2’s care of Bodhi, “let us know if anything changes?”

“Will do.”

She put a hand to Cassian’s shoulder and padded down to the galley.

The rest of the way to Eadu was peaceful enough. Bodhi recovered whatever he could of his sense of self after the Bor Gullet, sleeping in long stretches under Jyn’s ministrations. The young pilot seemed to take to Jyn, if only because of her link to the man who had made him believe in himself. On her part, he figured Jyn clung to Bodhi as a remnant of her biological parents. On one of the many nights she huddled close to him in their bunk, she said that Bodhi had told her what had happened to her mother: deathtroopers had shot her the day they took her father. She had apparently tried to intervene on his behalf instead of following Jyn to their hideout. He had held her that night tightly than before and made little of it in the morning, when she didn’t mention the incident further.

They also got to know Baze and Chirrut’s particular fascinating dynamic of bickering in a way that showed that they deeply loved each other. Cassian was more than surprised to learn of Jyn’s interest in the Force’s ways. She showed the blind man and him by extension what it was that she carried around her neck. It was a piece of kyber crystal with an ancient inscription on it. Jyn quietly revealed that it had been her mothers, but didn’t say when or why she was given the crystal.

“I’m not really the praying type,” she was saying, as he looked on at her talking about herself to strangers more than she ever had to him in three years, “but sometimes I just hold it and try to focus my thoughts on… something.”

“I could teach you to meditate, if you’d like,” said Imwe, his milky eyes somehow betraying something like bemusement.

“I would like that,” Jyn replied softly, and then just as quickly went to check something on their trajectory that was wholly unnecessary.

By the time they were coming into realspace near Eadu, Baze Malbus was calling Jyn “little sister”.

 

**

 

Their landing on Eadu wasn’t so much a landing, but a crash against scraggly rocks in a canyon under a heavy torrent. He could say he did what he could under Bodhi’s directions, but the planet’s climate was apparently impossible and he suddenly understood Krennic’s distate for it.

And then, him and Jyn’s easy camaraderie was blown into smithereens as soon as he suggested she stay in the ship while he went with Bodhi to extract her father.

“No way,” she said, her eyes dark and ablaze under the shuttle’s dim lighting, “he’s my father and I should be the one to go get him. Stop being such a martyr.”

He didn’t dare explain to her _why_ he wanted to be the one to try and get Galen Erso on their ship, but ended up agreeing with her that it would be useful if he hung back on the crags on the way to the landing platform where Bodhi said Jyn could infiltrate from and from where he could easily steal them a ship. That way, Cassian could cover them both with his sniper rifle. He figured that Jyn’s disappointment at her father’s potential refusal to come with them was better than having to explain to her that he had killed her father for that very reason.

So Jyn put on a spare Imperial uniform they had on the ship and followed Bodhi out in the rain. Cassian hung back, putting his rifle together under Baze Malbus’s gaze and Chirrut Imwe’s perceptive company. Jyn had landed a kiss on his head on her way out, oddly less upset with him than he previously thought, breezily optimistic for someone about to infiltrate an Imperial research facility with just a lieutenant uniform that barely fit for cover.

It was miserable out. Too dark, too wet and too cold. His hair was instantly sopping wet and water was getting into his eyes. He pulled out his night goggles and saw that Jyn and Bodhi were both well underway in approaching the well-lit platform. The lump of rock he was leaning against was the perfect height to mount his rifle in the direction of the platform, should anyone approach either of his comrades. At least if Galen Erso pulled some kind of stunt as Jyn came out with him, he could blame his killing shot in this awful weather.

His comlink buzzed. It was K-2.

“There’s a delta class T-3c shuttle incoming.”

Top brass, Cassian thought automatically. He didn’t know any particular officer who piloted a ship like that. He saw it come in and gently land on the platform and though Cassian didn’t have any particular interest in spacecraft, he had to admit that the ship looked fascinating. He brought his goggles to his eyes as the ship’s ramp was lowered and in Eadu’s dismal night there was no mistaking who it was that came out of it.

His heart stuttered almost painfully, as he imagined the worst-case scenario that was suddenly very clearly unfolding before him. The man in stark white on that platform was their neighbor, the one with whom he had spent many a night drinking the finest Corellian ale and watching smashball with. Krennic would take one look at the young woman wearing that ill-fitting lieutenant uniform and instantly recognize the person he knew as Kestrel Sward. There would be no explanation for her to be there except the information he himself had given them on where he had been stationed. He would most likely have Kestrel arrested. The least of their worries was Krennic finding out her real identity; what she knew as an Alliance intelligence agent was far more compromising.

Cassian knew he had basically one choice should that happen. Kill the Ersos. Both of them. Save the Alliance’s secrets and fly back to Yavin IV as fast as he could in order to relay to them all the information he had recently discovered.

Or he could just shoot Krennic instead – but then risk the entire operation with the station going into high alert.

So far, he managed to ignore all his discomfort lying there perched on wet rocks under the heavy rain. Nevertheless, his hands started trembling and he knew it wasn’t from the cold. The prescribed medicine for these episodes, the occurrence of which he had relayed to Alliance medical personnel in his briefs months before, had been used on Bodhi with his agreement. He breathed I through his nose and out through his mouth, in an attempt to settle down his hands, and tried to focus on what was happening on the platform instead of on his erratic heartbeat; there was something _definitely_ happening there.

Since getting out of his shuttle, Krennic hadn’t budged, standing there with a line of heavily armed deathtroopers a few steps behind him. From inside the facility, a group of men came out, most wearing what looked to be laboratory apparel. One man, however, led them, wearing a more formal uniform. Cassian instantly recognized him as Galen Erso. His heart sped up even more, if that was possible. The man was dead center in his line of shot as he spoke to Krennic. It would be just a matter of pulling the trigger and in Draven’s book, the Alliance would have a victory. Erso then turned to look at the row of men standing with him in front of his senior officer and Cassian almost tossed his rifle aside: even from this distance, he could tell Jyn Erso had her father’s eyes.

There wasn’t much time to dwell on such sentimentality, however. Erso seemed altered suddenly, though Krennic continued standing in front of him as if nothing much of consequence was happening. Then the deathtroopers fired on everyone else _but_ Erso. Krennic must have connected the dots and figured that Bodhi Rook’s defection had had something to do with his old friend.

Cassian’s attention was suddenly drawn elsewhere, however, as he made out a small shape climbing onto the platform, nimble hands stark white against the railings. His chest seized again, in a way that made him ask himself how much it could take. And then his comlink buzzed.

“The rebel fleet is flying in. They’re about to raid the platform."

“ _What?_ ”

Cassian had no idea what Draven was thinking.

“What I just said,” said K-2, slightly petulantly.

“Tell them to hold off! Jyn’s on that platform!”

The droid grumbled something in response, but Cassian was now far too busy trying to run down the rocky crags that surrounded the facility without falling on his face. Just as he was reaching the platform, a group of X-Wing fighters approached the station and started firing indiscriminate of there being people on it or not. Krennic must have quickly escaped, surrounded by his ‘trooper detail, because Cassian lost sight of him. He saw Jyn in her drenched uniform – Joreth Sward’s uniform, really –, hiding behind crates and taking out a ‘trooper or two as she ran. The bombs kept falling, but she ignored them, running in the direction of one of the fallen bodies on the platform.

He was too busy climbing with his heart caught in his throat to really know what he was doing and to wonder if she would still be there when he finally got to her. It turned out she was. Wet through with the rain in her uniform, her face marred with pain, her hands shaking just as much as his. Galen Erso, however, the brilliant mind behind the most terrifying weapon ever built in the Galaxy, was lifeless in his daughter’s arms.

“Jyn!” he yelled at the top of his lungs, his chest burning with the smoke from the ion bombs, “we have to go!”

She was screaming incoherently at her father’s limp body, running her hands furiously over the man’s haggard face. Cassian grabbed her by the arm, tugged her against him and dragged her away, finding that for that to happen he had to employ every ounce of his strength.

He didn’t know how he climbed back to the ship with her. At times she was walking alongside him, at others she was refusing to budge and he had to half-carry her up the slippery rocks. When they made it into the ship, her eyes were the color of a raging sea and just as watery, and she turned to him with all the wrath he knew her capable of, but had never actually witnessed.

“Those were Alliance bombs!”

He stood there silently, oddly contrite, not really knowing what to say.

“Those were Alliance bombs that killed him. Draven sent them to kill him. They could have killed _us_.”

Again he said nothing. He didn’t know what to do to make it all better. Her eyes suddenly widened and she ignored the men standing around the ship, as drenched as them. She whirled on her feet and went to the communications bay. Before he could react, she was punching commands that he didn’t even know she knew and listened to the information available.

“You went out there shoot him!” She accused.

His belly finally burned with red-hot rage at her lack of trust.

“I didn’t! I went there to cover you and Rook!”

“Just admit it, Cassian. You went there to shoot my father.”

He shook his head.

“I didn’t shoot him, did I?” she didn’t say anything, “ _did I?”_

“Those were Alliance ships and bombs! It might as well have been you.”

“I disobeyed orders, Jyn. It was the first time I did so. And you’re as much Alliance as I am.”

Her eyes widened even further.

“You would have shot _me_!” She seemed aghast. “If Krennic had seen me, you would have shot me!”

He ran his hands over his face, dripping water on the ship’s floor. Jyn’s chin was trembling. Her face was pale. He was fisting his hands so hard not to convey that he was shaking like the pathetic idiot he was it hurt. He encroached on her space, stood towering over her in some ridiculous attempt to regain his control, but found that he had to push the words through his teeth.

“I didn’t, Jyn! I didn’t! It was a mission. I had orders. _I_ didn’t follow them. It’s the first time I’ve done this in my life. You’re in shock.”

“You can’t talk your way around this.”

“I don’t have to.”

They were standing awfully close to each other and she aimed a parting shot right where it hurt.

“You and Draven might as well be stormtroopers.”

It hit him probably as heavily as the ion blasts that had just killed her father. He unclenched his fists and let his arms fall to his side. It didn’t even register how badly his hands were shaking until she gasped and he raged inside because the last thing he needed right now was her pity. It took him a long while to realize that she wasn’t reacting to his condition but rather to her own words. He only figured that when her hands were suddenly cradling his face, her ragged breath mixed with his own.

“I’m sorry,” she was saying, through her tears, which were now actually falling down her cheeks, “I’m sorry.”

Cassian peeled her hands off his face and stepped backwards, breathing in and out until he could gather himself. She seemed hurt by this action and he warred with his urge to catch her in his arms, because she had just lost her second parent in a string of three days and she was worried that _his_ feelings might be hurt.

He couldn’t, though. He just couldn’t go back into her orbit and end up as scathed as he was feeling right now. So he took another step back, turned around, and went to try and com Bodhi to see if they finally had a ship to leave that kriffing planet behind.


	14. Help, I'm alive

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jyn's response to sudden loss if much like my own. This chapter has mentions of anxiety symptoms. 
> 
> I didn't have a lot of time to answer the comments on the last chapter, but know that every single comment and kudos are appreciated. You guys are the best!

It didn’t take long for Bodhi to com them a signal saying he had a ship. They supposed it would be an ordinary cargo shuttle, so it meant that they had to leave the comforts of their old Corellian freighter. Packing essentials was what Jyn resorted to in order to keep from plummeting into more grief and confusion than she was already dealing with, sullenly ignoring the looks Baze kept throwing her and Chirrut’s occasional vague jibes at her and Cassian. They worked silently, rushing against time to transfer whatever they could in the heavy rain from one shuttle to another. Cassian was pointedly ignoring her and she bit her lip against the sharp pain the knot in her throat was causing her.

It wasn’t fair, really. None of it was. First she had left Saw behind in a crumbling cave, with a wave of rock and debris hurtling in his direction. There was no way he survived; there was no way _no one_ left behind in Jedha did and a for a brief second, Jyn wondered about Tuc, the Alliance contact who had given them Cassian’s old droid.

Then there was her father. She hadn’t been fast enough. The Alliance had soiled a plan that had its chances of failure, yes – no Imperial officer would ever be caught unpunished with the cuffs of their uniform trousers and jacket sleeves rolled up multiple times like she was – but which she ultimately felt she could carry out. She could have been with her father now and with significant proof of the possibilities that the Death Star could be destroyed. Jyn ignored the voice in her head that told her that Krennic would have shot her father either way after executing all those men – fellow engineers, she supposed. Instead, she focused on the fact that the rebel attack could have been the perfect cover for her to run off with her own surviving parent if only she had run faster and not cowered at the sight of her neighbor from Coruscant.

It was one thing, however, to lose things she had always felt she had never really had for a long time, like her father and to a certain extent, Saw. Both had abandoned her at different points in her life, in ways that she failed to understand at the time. She hadn’t even thought of her father as being alive for most of her life. Having him ripped away from her just as she had him restored to her was cruel, yes, and it hurt, but surprisingly it wasn’t what was hurting her the most at the moment. Because to feel her trust in Cassian shattered by his orders by Draven was really what was making her chest burn as if she were drowning. She had obviously gone too far, though, in her tirade. No matter what Draven had ordered him to do, he hadn’t, in the end, actually gone through with it. She knew how he had been feeling about their mission in the past few months, how it slowly seeped at his sense of self-worth. To equal him to the thing they hated the most had been wrong of her and his rejection of her apology left her feeling drained by self-hatred.

This was ridiculous. She felt ridiculous. The last thing she had been growing up was a spoiled child. Privileged, yes, until her parents had left her in a hatch on Lah’mu, but never spoiled. And now she had tossed away something that had been given her, broken it and was crying because of it.

Bodhi approached their wrecked ship with the cargo shuttle he stole and they all piled into it, dripping rainwater everywhere they went. Jyn busied herself putting their packs in some semblance of order in a corner of the main hold. Baze and Chirrut settled behind the cockpit, where K-2 appeared to be helping Bodhi calculate coordinates. Cassian was downstairs, checking the ship for more supplies despite the fact that cargo ships usually had a smaller crew than their current group.

Bodhi and K-2 set their course for Yavin IV and broke atmo with enough surety to pass for an ordinary shuttle on a shipping mission. Jyn, meanwhile, fumbled with her pack in order to find her old clothes back and to get rid of her sopping Imperial uniform. Her hands were shaking less than they were as she packed, but she felt exhausted and all she wanted was to find some corner in the cargo hold to fall asleep before they arrived. She knew that whatever it was they would face when they got to Yavin IV wasn’t going to be easy. She stubbornly decided that if Cassian was bothered with her presence in the same part of the ship as him, he should be the one to move. She had, after all, already apologized for her words.

He was still tinkering downstairs when she arrived with a bundle of clothes under her arm to improvise a bed in some corner. She tried her hardest not to look at him, but found her eyes straying in order to see if his hands were still shaking, if his shoulders were still tense. He seemed overall a bit more settled, probably still under the adrenaline rush that escaping in a stolen ship was bound to give anyone. She was about to sit down on the floor to start settling in when he spoke, his voice still heavy.

“I know you didn’t really mean it. Perhaps that’s why it hurt more.”

His hair was starting to dry, small wisps of it reflecting the dim lighting in the cargo hold in shades of brown she had never noticed before.

“I already apologized,” she jutted out her chin as she said it.

He turned to look at her, his mouth in the same crooked line it was before, when he got in her face, angry as hell. She wanted to soften it. She hated herself for that.

“I won’t pretend to know what’s going through your mind right now. But you must know, surely,” his lower lip trembled – what was visible of it in the set of his mouth, really, “you’re not the only one who’s lost everything.”

She fiddled with the bundle of blankets she had grabbed from their bunk in the other ship as an afterthought, even though she wasn’t entirely conscious of her movements. He was right. Of course he was right. He had once told her his parents were dead, that he had been fighting since he was six years old. It was a story very similar to hers, except for the ever-present doubt in the back of her mind in her case: the difference between death and disappearance. Would her parents ever walk into back into her life, just as they walked in the Imperials’ direction that day? Would she ever feel whole again? Cassian didn’t have that and she knew that on most days that was a relief compared to the nagging feeling she had lived with since she was eight, but it meant different things. It meant permanent loss; not only of people who mattered to him, but also of his sense of self.

“You could argue that at least I had hope until now, but that’s not quite how I felt,” she said conversationally, if a bit shakily.

“Hope?” He asked, his eyes two dark hollow things.

“Rebellions are built on hope, aren’t they?”

“I suppose so, but-“

“Cassian, I’m really sorry I said what I did.”

He shook his head, looked down in his hands.

“Yes, I got an order from Draven to kill your father. It didn’t mean I would follow it or that I thought it was the right course of action for the Alliance’s interests. And I would never _ever_ shoot you. I’d rather be court martialed, honestly.”

“But you’re always such a-“

“A stick-in-mud? Probably. But I’ve been struggling to finish off people who are hurting the rebellion. What would you suppose I’d feel if I had to kill the father of the woman I’ve been-“

He didn’t finish, just stayed looking at her with those delicate eyes of his, now impossibly softened. Her fingers itched to grab at his cheekbones again, but she remained still, waiting for him. In these moments, she found she was much better off waiting for him. Her lips moved despite herself, the words forced out of them.

“You’d disobey orders for me?”

He sighed, mumbled something she didn’t understand, and took another step closer to her. She found she was quite surrounded by him, didn’t really have a way out, and because of that, despite him just saying that he wouldn’t hurt her, her heart started to beat a hole out of her chest. She let out a shaky breath through her mouth, still watching him carefully, and didn’t even register what he was doing until she felt his hand at the back of her neck, pressing at the collar of her shirt.

“For Force’s sake, Jyn,” he said, and pressed his lips to hers.

Her brain screamed _Cassian_ instead of _Joreth_ like it had that night he had kissed her in bed. This was entirely different from being kissed by an Imperial lieutenant in front of an audience for the sake of a mission. _Nothing_ about it was perfunctory. She felt his fingers on the back of her neck, on the side of her face, dragging into the elaborate bun she had put her hair into in some semblance of Imperial order. She grabbed him by the front of his jacket and when he was fully pressed against her, his still wet clothes leaking into her dry ones, she wrapped her arms around his waist, spread her hands over the lean muscles of his back and parted her legs so he could shove one of his between them. Before she knew what was going on, he was dragging a hand under her shirt, leaving a trail of goose bumps on her back she had never felt before with anyone else. She felt something sharp and achy between her legs and at that, her stomach plunged like a bucket of ice had just been dropped down her back.

He had tugged himself away from her mouth and was kissing a trail down her neck. She took advantage of that to try and breathe a little, but she felt oddly dissociated from her body, as if she was watching herself instead of taking part in it.

“Cassian, stop,” she rasped, hoping that he would hear over the din of the ship.

He did. They were spies, too perceptive for their own good. It was a testament to how their relationship messed with his head that he hadn’t noticed that she was a mess before.

Cassian searched her eyes, visibly worried, almost embarrassed, really. She felt stupid, but soldiered on.

“I can’t. It’s – it’s too much.”

“No, no,” he pressed a kiss to her head, “of course you can’t. I don’t know what I was thinking. I’m sorry.”

She closed her eyes, feeling like she had been run over by a herd of banthas.

“I more than encouraged you,” she mumbled, “and I’ve done- _things_ – when I was feeling lousy before, but it never felt quite like this.”

“You’ve never lost all of your parents before. Not really.”

She almost rushed to correct that she meant that _sex_ or _affection_ had never really felt like she was feeling now, with this sense that her heart was about to burst and that every nerve ending that was touching him was on fire, but she stopped herself. This was not the time for this. They had to get to Yavin, face the council, convince them to deploy people to Scarif to _try_ and get the plans to a battle station so they could _attempt_ to destroy it. No one in their right mind should be discussing how someone made them feel as if were an adolescent at school, even if they had never been to school, as was Jyn’s case.

So she just leaned her head on his shoulder. He gestured to her improvised bed next to them.

“Get some sleep. I’ll wake you in an hour. You more than deserve some rest.”

She only nodded. He dropped a kiss on the top of her head and disappeared up the stairs.

 

**

 

She didn’t know what exactly she had been expecting once they got to Yavin IV. They were split up, for one thing, which made sense now that she thought about it. Bodhi, Chirrut and Baze were taken to interrogation; Cassian and she were led each into a different debrief session. Draven’s face when he saw her in person was stern, but just enough that it didn’t shatter his neutral expression, even though his eyes were hard and as narrow as slits. He was a spy as much as they were, after all.

She was left exhausted after relaying almost three years worth of information and recounting every little farking detail of their trips into Jedha and Eadu. Jyn knew she was supposed to tell them things she had and things she hadn’t seen, in as crucial detail as possible. And like the good soldier that she was, she even managed to curtail her very decided opinions on the rebel raid that had ended up killing her father. Debriefs weren’t the space for that sort of thing 

It was weird for her, being back into military hierarchy, having to stand at attention in front of officers, of deferring to them. At the time she had been taken for training on Dantooine, her rank had been that of a private, but now apparently she had been promoted to sergeant, as indicated by the stripes on the clothes she was given by the quartermasters when her superior officers were done with her. She was assigned a bunk in a collective dormitory with other women officers, something that rankled her as much as having to share a bed with Cassian had in the first months of their mission on Coruscant. Yes, she was used to having to share her space with other fighters – male and female of all species alike – but this wasn’t Saw’s cadre, where any scuffle could be dealt with a screaming match and an appeal to his leadership. Alliance troops were complex, divided into assault units, intelligence work, fighter pilots, cargo pilots, medical personnel. It was slightly mind-boggling to think of, despite her having five years under her belt as a part of it. Dantooine had been a base about to be deactivated, with ground troops that were tapering off to Yavin IV and other locations, which made it convenient to train intelligence officers. All this, all these people rushing past her involved with different errands, the magnitude of this and the feeling of belonging it was supposed to elicit slightly discomfited her. She was far too used to watch her own back.

What bothered her the most when she sat down in the mess hall to eat whatever gunk it was that passed for a meal there was the fact that she hadn’t seen Cassian since their arrival. She had read in a brief before joining him on the mission that agents that went on long-haul assignments together were likely to develop some form of codependency and she had shrugged that off as a impossible. Jyn had never been dependent on anyone since her parents’ disappearance. She felt the words on her datapad as she read at that time were a slap on her face now.

At the same time, she _really_ didn’t want to think about what had happened in the cargo hold of the shuttle on their way back from Eadu.

Thankfully, that line of thinking was interrupted by the sight of a pony-tailed cargo pilot hunkered over his food, equally alone at a table. She grabbed her tray with whatever was left of her meal and placed it as gently as it could across from him.

“Have they been treating you ok?” She asked, lowering her head so she could peer at his large eyes.

“Y-yes. They gave me some more medicine and assigned me a bunk. I told them I wanted to join up, so they said I needed training first.”

She smirked. “They like that. Training. As if they didn’t need whatever set of skills you had before they found you.”

“Well, I certainly have none.”

“Nonsense, Bodhi. What you did was really brave and it certainly took guts, but that’s not all there is to it. You could have foiled everything… From meeting me in Imperial Center to defecting from Eadu to stealing that ship for us two days ago. That’s skill.”

“Thanks, Jyn,” he mumbled, and she marveled at the warm feeling that him saying her real name brought to her chest.

They finished their meals in silence and then Bodhi fished a deck of cards from the pocket of flight uniform. They both sat with the toasted corn the Alliance grew on Yavin acting as chips, playing until their eyes were drooping shut.

The comlink she was given chirped just as she was about to tell Bodhi that they should call it a night. It was a simple message, relayed by a nameless operative, saying that she was invited to appear before the Alliance Council the next morning, at 0900.

“Well,” she said, her voice sounded bitterer than she felt, “we’ll see if Papa’s sacrifice wasn’t in vain.”

“You don’t think they’ll take you seriously,” Bodhi said, his large eyes a shade gloomier than they already were.

“They might believe us, but we’ll see if they’ll do something about it. It’ll be a odd way to die, certainly.”

Bodhi shuffled his cards silently, but Jyn noticed he flinched a bit as she spoke. She supposed cargo pilots weren’t as careless or used to the idea of their own demise as spy agents.

“Cassian will be there with you,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Yes, I suppose so.”

She got up, ruffled Bodhi’s hair and went to her dormitory.

 

**

 

Jyn couldn’t sleep. Her “roommates” were perfectly fine people, but people she had never seen in her life, and even as she felt drained and sleepy by the events of the last days, their presence – even their steady breaths as they slept – annoyed her. She checked her chrono for the umpteenth time since she had laid down in her bunk and felt something squeeze in her chest at the thought that she would have to face the Alliance Council the next morning on little to no sleep if this continued.

Her legs felt too hot under her issue blanket, but when she got it off her, it wasn’t long before she felt cold. Her hands were clammy and despite her closing her eyes and focusing on her breathing, she found that it did little for her heartbeat. It didn’t take long for her legs to feel numb, and she finally shoved away her covers and got out of bed.

She put on her boot without lacing them up, not bothering changing out of the sleep clothes she had been given by the quartermaster. She only pulled on a jacket for warmth against the jungle breeze as she stepped out into the corridors in the Massassi temple that served as base. She never thought she would have to put her espionage training to use in something entirely personal, but there she was.

She found his quarters easily enough and stood clutching her jacket closed as she considered what she would say when he opened the door. Jyn considered hacking the door panel for a brief moment, but that would only get her a blaster hole between the eyes, knowing him. So she knocked, a light rap of her fingers she knew he would hear.

He was as sleepless as she was, apparently, his face drawn and the opposite of his softened features such as she remembered from their kitchen in early mornings back on Coruscant. Despite their three long years away, the scruff on his face and the way his hair was falling on his eyes made him seem like he belonged in the base of a political resistance movement, a far cry from the neat Imperial officer she was supposedly married to. She crossed her arms in front of her chest, defensively, as he scanned her clothing with a raised eyebrow.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she blurted out, “I don’t know any of those people. There’s the Council tomorrow. I don’t know if they’ll-“

Cassian put his left hand out, tugged her in his direction with his right one.

He hushed her, his eyebrows furrowed. “Lights out, Jyn.”

As soon as she was in his quarters, he let go of her.

“Can I-“

“Sure. I’ll sleep on the floor.”

She was pretty sure she looked like her eyes were going to pop out of her sockets.

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Only trying to be, you know, the decent sort.”

She shook her head at him, eyes still wide, slipping out of her undone boots, and glimpsed at the narrow bunk next to small desk with the narrow stool and the door that probably led to a private ‘fresher. His eyes were following hers.

“Only a sink and a toilet. No shower.”

“Shame,” she hummed, dimly realizing what that might sound like.

She made herself at home in his bunk, even if checking on him as she moved. Cassian seemed relaxed, at last, blinking slightly heavier. He laid down next to her, with no way to keep their otherwise imposed distance. She didn’t hesitate, wrapped her arm around the width of his stomach, put a leg between his and her head on his chest. His heart was hammering inside and she tapped on his sternum lightly, shushing it. She felt rather than heard him snort above her head.

She opened her mouth to say something, but he pressed a finger to her lips.

“Go to sleep. Council tomorrow.”

“Alright.”

Jyn was out like a light.


	15. My heart is beating like a hammer

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a companion piece to the last chapter, as the title indicates. 
> 
> Maybe I'm dragging this along because I like writing these two idiots.

Cassian had been nervous from the time they touched down on Yavin IV, and not just on account of what had happened between him and Jyn during the trip. At first, only because he would have to face Draven after not following his orders. The undefined nature of his and Jyn’s relationship really became the last thing on his mind, however, when he realized, not a few minutes into his debrief, that the Alliance Council would never consider an operation into Scarif to recover the Death Star plans. He didn’t know how exactly he knew that to be the case, but he felt it in his guts and he couldn’t shake the feeling off throughout the whole interview.

Draven was unflappable. Cassian presented the gathered intel with the same sort of crisp professionalism he always did in these occasions, ever since he was sixteen and had been groomed as an officer. He tried, though, to convey to Draven and the other analysts the meaning of all it entailed. He didn’t embellish anything, just put what he thought was the right amount of emphasis on points he figured would convince the officers of the sensitivity of the facts presented. He described as best as he could the destruction of Jedha and then relayed Galen Erso’s message. Throughout this bit of his debrief, he held Draven’s eyes in an even stare.

“Evidence has it you didn’t shoot that man when you had the chance, captain,” his boss said finally, mouth tightly drawn in a line.

Cassian was pretty sure his own features weren’t dissimilar to the older man’s, despite the rush he felt go down his spine.

“Well, sir, with all due respect, Alliance troops killed him anyway.”

“Yes, but you had an order.”

“I had an order to shoot him _if_ he resisted extraction. We didn’t even have the time to try it.”

Draven eyed him warily in a way he never had before, and Cassian realized that maybe Jyn had rubbed off on him just the right amount over the last three years.

“Not that I owe you any explanation, _C_ _aptain_ , but we made that decision based on the intel you yourself provided and on the information given by our man on the ground in Jedha.”

Cassian blinked. He thought Tuc had been killed in the attack. Draven was sure to notice his reaction.

“Corporal Damen Seer, probably known to you under an assumed alias, was killed in NiJedha, but he managed one last transmission before communications shut down.”

Cassian lowered his eyes and minutely shook his head. It had been too much to hope for, after all.

“We could have gotten Dr. Erso out of Eadu and here,” Cassian insisted, jaw clenched to the point it hurt, “he was what we needed to make a point to the Alliance Council that we _need_ to take action.”

Draven didn’t dignify that with an answer. Just instead diverted him with other questions regarding Eadu and Krennic. Cassian was left on the point with exhaustion, wracking his brain for every single morsel of information he could think of that would convince his boss to make the recommendation to the Council to invade Scarif. In the end, he was left tired and frustrated. He just didn’t feel, in the men around him, the same sense of urgency that was past boiling point in his own blood.

In the end, Draven had one more request for him.

“Captain, I want you to sit down for a quick psych evaluation. You have been in the field for three years, doing things that are not fit for anyone who intends to stay in their right mind. I understand that you’ve been given a few prescriptions by our medical personnel… I suggest you go talk to them about it.”

He felt his hackles go up, not unlike a certain gray-green-eyed officer who was probably in one of the briefing rooms next door.

“Are you suggesting I’m unfit for service, sir?” The words burst from his mouth before he could stop them.

As soon as he said them, he figured him posing that question alone to a general should be enough for anyone to question his sanity, but Cassian thought to himself that Draven was Draven – the man who had raised him into what he was. He supposed he could take a few liberties.

The older man sighed, pinched the bridge of his nose. “No, Andor. I’m trying to avoid you becoming so. Go talk to them.”

“Fine, sir,” he mumbled and then cleared his throat, “is sergeant Erso already done with her debrief?”

“Not that I know of. She probably has a lot more questions to answer, since we’ve discovered her identity.”

He did contain himself this time in order not to give Draven another piece of his mind.

As he was moving out of the briefing room in the Temple’s lower floors, he perceived a familiar figure in an elaborate Alderaanian outfit in muted earth tones, probably looking for Draven. For a while he wondered if the man would recognize him, but then remembered the evening in Imperial Center when he and Jyn got their order to go to Jedha.

“Captain Andor,” the man boomed.

He bowed his head respectfully, as if he still were the senate aide he spent years of his life pretending to be. It never occurred to him that it might seem foolish to do so.

“Senator.”

“Senator Mothma and General Draven tell me your mission was a only a partial success… I wish to convey my sympathies to Sergeant Erso on both of her fathers’ passing. You know, I met her when she was a child and here with Gerrera for a meeting once. She was under an assumed name, of course.”

Cassian frowned. “I think she’s still in debrief around here somewhere, your highness. Maybe you’ll be able to pay your respects in person.”

“If you ask me, I was surprised to find out she’s only now just become a sergeant. As far as I know, she was Saw’s lieutenant when she joined us. She should have been given a rank according to that position.”

Cassian felt his eyebrows rising of their own accord. For once in his life, he felt bold enough in face of his connection to the Organas. If the Senator was openly criticizing Draven, maybe he could make some difference in the Council meeting – whenever that was going to be – by filling in the man on his view of how things had played out on Eadu. Cassian stuck to Basic, however, because switching to Alderaanian would be a step too far.

“With all due respect, your highness, I don’t think that Segeant Erso would call Galen Erso’s death simply ‘passing’.”

Bail Organa’s eyes widened.

_“Tiene objeciones a las decisiones de sus superiores?”_

Cassian’s shoulders sagged in relief a bit on hearing his native language. The man was giving them the opportunity of speaking without being fully understood by everyone around them. People in intelligence dominated several languages, but at least the entire extent of the Rebel Alliance command chain wouldn’t know what they were talking about.

_“Si, su alteza. Jyn estaba dirigiéndose a la base para buscar su padre. El bombardeo empezó antes que ella pudiese adentrar a las instalaciones.”_

Organa clenched his jaw, shook his head in slight reprobation of his fellow rebels’ actions.

“ _Estén en la reunión del Consejo mañana. Presenten toda la información que usted y Sargenta Erso consiguieron en las dos misiones. Es la única esperanza de que tomemos acción._

_“Si, su alteza.”_

_“Gracias por la información, Capitán. Voy a consultar Mon Mothma sobre otras acciones que podemos poner en corso. Yo tengo algunas ideas. Tenga un buen día.”_

In reply to the older man’s farewell, Cassian only bowed his head again.

He practically jogged to his evaluation in the medbay.

 

**

 

Cassian knew better than to lie to their on-base psychiatrist. Dr. Drea Tarwin was a Chandrila woman with a sort of serenity very akin to Mon Mothma’s. With her honey-colored hair braided down one of her shoulders and the pristine white robes typical of their planet, Dr. Tarwin was the sort to dupe her patients into thinking she was less perceptive than she actually was. With a couple of well placed sentences, however, whoever thought would banthashit their way through a consult was quickly left feeling naked, while friendly - and honestly quite young-looking - Drea would just blink her eyes at them in feigned innocence. Whenever Cassian had sat in front of her, he understood a little bit more about how it was that Mon Mothma must have climbed to the position of leadership she occupied in the Rebellion ever since he had joined it as a child.

The psychiatrist didn’t ask him too much about his relationship with Jyn and that was something Cassian found consolation in, when compared to the increasing feeling of unease in his gut. Through research alone he knew that the symptoms he had been displaying for a while now were normal in people who had seen some form of combat or other for as long as he had, but it was one thing intellectually knowing something and another emotionally dealing with it. Talking about it bothered him, but right now it felt like a waste of time, and if admitting to his weaknesses got him through whatever protocols were ahead of him, than that was fine. He was confident Tarwin saw right through that, but was letting him off the hook for some reason.

He was sent off with a medical order to use his time on base to rest and was told that a recommendation would be made to his superiors to avoid missions that would put too much of a strain on him. It took him all of his training not to snort at Dr. Tarwin. She only pointedly glared at him before he walked out of the room.

So if Tarwin didn’t ask about Jyn in his evaluation – about how their working or their personal relationship was affecting him now that they were out of cover –, he knew better than to think that she wouldn’t at a later opportunity, if they ever came of this alive. If she knew they all had priorities right now, she was aware that his and Jyn’s _entanglement_ – he didn’t quite know what to call it exactly – shouldn’t be occupying so much of their minds when there was a planet killer already making victims in the Galaxy.

He was crossing the hangar in order to look for the members of the extraction team under Draven’s command when he heard a familiar voice call out to him from near their stolen shuttle.

“Jyn is looking for you.”

He balked for a bit, with a curse between his teeth that he should just keep walking and not take the bait. As with most things relating to his mission partner, however, he found it irresistible.

“I really don’t have time for this,” he found himself saying.

The blind monk was sitting there with his infuriating smile, although to Cassian’s brand of perception, a little bit of despair could be seen in the way the corners of his mouth were turned up.

“You’ll regret it later.”

“In order to prevent what you’re alluding to as _later_ , I have to delay _other concerns_.”

After saying that, Cassian bit his lower lip. He really wished he had more patience with the guardians of the Whills, but it was really difficult reaching for the abiding side of his nature when the laser cannon of a space station the size of a moon could be hours away from being aimed at them. He sighed and approached the two men.

“You seem in doubt, Captain,” said Chirrut, his liquid eyes solemn.

“I don’t think the Council is going to do the right thing tomorrow,” he found himself saying, clenching his fingers inside his fatigues’ pockets.

“No matter what happens tomorrow,” the blind man said, “I have already decided what to do.”

“Oh, have you?” Grunted his partner, from where he was dismantling his repeater cannon.

Cassian eyed Baze Malbus and could barely contain his amusement, something he knew the older man wouldn’t necessarily appreciate.

“What is that?” He asked Chirrut.

“I am going to follow Jyn.”

He huffed a laugh, something humorless and detached from his body, and stalked off without replying.

He found Sergeant Ruescott Melshi playing cards at the end of the hangar, unloading supplies from a U-Wing very similar to the one he used to fly before being sent to Coruscant with a pretend wife. Melshi looked older, his eyes too lined for his young years, the hands that held onto to the sabacc cards gritty like a mechanic’s, except Cassian knew he did little heavy repair work. They were not unlike his own hands before they grew softer in the years he spent trying to listen to Imperial secrets amid fine dinners and bureaucratic work at the Academy.

“Andor!” Melshi looked genuinely surprised to see him on base. “You’re back!?”

Something in Cassian broke a little a bit at the greeting. He never considered himself to have friends on base. He had always been careful not to form attachments. He never did what Melshi was doing now – sitting down with a deck of cards with a young corporal just for the sake of it. He felt slightly closer to Melshi than to the average Alliance soldier, because Melshi’s unit was under Draven’s command – they did the same sort of dirty work he did when the situation didn’t require subtlety. He had trusted Melshi enough in the past to tell K-2SO to help them out in particularly tricky extractions where a former Imperial security droid could be a convenient asset; thinking back on it, Cassian had realized that it said a lot about how he felt about the other man that he would part company with his only actual real friend if he felt they could use the assistance. He had never done anything like that for anyone else in the Alliance, for all the priority he gave it in his life – although few people other than those he knew from Intelligence would actually trust K-2SO. Now, though, when everything looked bleaker than ever, he found himself strangely lamenting that he hadn’t known men like Melshi and his fellow soldiers better.

He realized that the only other sentient he had ever established a real relationship with had been Jyn. And even that he felt was tenuous at best.

Cassian only nodded at Melshi and scanned the hangar briefly. He took one look at the young mustachioed soldier playing cards with the sergeant and decided that if he was really proposing what he was about to be proposing, then perhaps this kid should be left out of the loop for now. He tilted his head to an empty landing platform just by the side of some X-Wings being loudly tinkered with. Melshi followed him wordlessly.

“Listen,” he began when he was sure they couldn’t be heard, “something big is up. The Empire has what it’s being called a planet killer – a weapon that’s nothing like the Galaxy has seen before. Jedha – the Holy City – has been entirely destroyed. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Escaped it through dumb luck, really. I suppose Draven hasn’t mentioned any of this to you guys.”

Melshi’s eyes seemed to take up half his face and Cassian stared him down until he schooled his features.

“If you’re talking to me, then I supposed there’s something to be done about it.”

“Yes, a scientist named Galen Erso placed a flaw in its design. But for us to attack it and destroy it, we need the plans to the station. They’re in an Imperial archive.”

“Well, then what’s-“

“I have a feeling the Council will not approve a mission. As far as my handlers let me know when I was away, we haven’t been… doing very well, have we?”

Melshi’s lips were set in a line. It was all the answer Cassian needed. He took a deep breath, moving on to the last part of his bid.

“If – if this really happens-“

The sergeant didn’t even let him put his thoughts into words. It was quite merciful – and perceptive - of him.

“I’ll be there. Just tell me the landing platform and the time. I’ll be there with as many of men and women as I can get.”

Cassian realized that through the whole exchange he had been clasping his own wrist behind his back a little too tightly. He nodded firmly, his jaw set.

 

**

 

Sometime during that same day, after pulling Bodhi into a corner to see how the young man was settling in, and to get a general feel of how far the pilot was willing to go to deal with their current predicament, Cassian realized two things: one, for the first time in his life he felt like a coward; two, he was in deeper than he originally thought when it came to Jyn Erso.

Both conclusions came to him in rapid succession, when he realized that not only he was fruitlessly avoiding the thought of the woman in question, he was also actually trying to avoid her _entirely_. This happened when he wandered into the mess hall to grab some food to eat in his assigned room, saw her sitting amicably with Bodhi, her eyes soft with sleep while she sloppily dealt them each a hand of sabacc, and his first instinct was to turn around and flee. He had to eat, however – he realized he hadn’t eaten anything all day between debriefs, the evaluation, managing to get everyone he could think of on board with whatever it was he would plan on the next day, and putting a rudimentary plan along with K-2SO – so he used his usual stealth to sneak into the kitchen and pile some food in the first container he could find. He stalked into his room with the food feeling more than a little pathetic.

He was scared that he would blurt out everything to her. Not only how he was feeling – had been, if he had been honest with himself, for a while now – but also his plans for when the Council meeting ended with the decision he thought they were going to take. And he needed Jyn in that room, ignorant of his movements, in order for her to try and sell them their plan without Draven picking up on anything. His absence in the room would be enough to prick their superior officer’s ears. There was no need for Draven to read _anything_ on Jyn’s manner of speaking before the Council. He didn’t trust anyone around Draven; not himself, not even Jyn.

When he was done eating and he told K-2 to go and get as fit as he could be for the next day - which included as many back-ups of himself as he could make - he went to the communal showers and spent the entire amount of Yavin IV’s luscious water that was allotted to him. Then he shut himself up in his room to try and sleep, faintly realizing that it would be the first time in Force knew how long that he would do so by himself.

Just as he was finally dosing off, the knock on his door that he had been denying to himself he was expecting came. As the door swished open, she was standing there wearing sleep clothes a tad too big for her, the jacket he recognized as Anaya Wellon’s and a pair of Alliance-issue boots. Her pupils were blown in the dark hallway and she was fidgeting with her hands. He must have reacted somehow, before she protectively crossed her arms across her chest, shoulders tense.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she blurted out, “I don’t know any of those people. There’s the Council tomorrow. I don’t know if they’ll-“

He could have kissed her for realizing the same things as him. He had, however, to cut it out. He pulled her into his room.

“Lights out, Jyn,” it came out harsher than he intended.

As soon as she was in his quarters, he let go of her. He wanted to hold her. He wanted to kick himself.

“Can I-“

His heart was certainly going to hammer a hole through his chest. So he suggested the one thing that as soon as came out of his mouth, sounded the most sensible and the most atrocious at the same time.

“Sure. I’ll sleep on the floor.”

Jyn’s eyes, which he already found impossibly beautiful and large enough, widened to a degree he thought he might drown in them, something flashing in the muted grays of her irises.

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

He shrugged. “Only trying to be, you know, the decent sort.”

She shook her head at him, eyes still wide and proceeded to toe off her undone boots. For the first time since she came in, she studied his private quarters. He was reminded of Bail Organa’s words to him that same day, about her deserving a higher rank than the one she held. If she did, she would probably have a room of her own and perhaps – but only perhaps, he mused – she might have been easier about sleeping that night. They would, after all, have to learn eventually to sleep apart. He tried to make himself feel easier by making mild conversation.

“Only a sink and a toilet. No shower.”

“Shame,” she muttered, and that sent something shooting down his spine.

She moved, then, sprawled herself in his bunk, and he took his time to try and get a grip on himself. It wouldn’t do to lie next to her while feeling like he was about to have a fit. He managed to settle his breathing, finally feeling exhaustion draining him. Once he checked she was settled in the bunk, he laid down next to her, trying to keep a little bit of distance. Jyn, however, didn’t seem to be having any of it. She draped an arm across his stomach and wedged a strong leg between his in what was bound to become embarrassing at any moment now. His heart started thumping way too loudly again and she tapped his chest. He couldn’t help the air coming out through his nostrils in a laugh.

He felt she was about to say something and it was his turn to shush her, putting a finger on the lips he knew so well already.

“Go to sleep. Council tomorrow.”

“Alright.” 

Jyn was out like a light. He didn’t know exactly how, but he followed soon after.

 

 

**

 

He was up before she was, thankfully, so he extracted himself from her embrace before either of them had to deal with the evidence of what she did to him.

Like the coward that he felt, he killed time checking on their cargo shuttle with K-2 before the Council assembled. Later, he saw her going into the crowded room, a crease between her brows as she was obviously looking for him. Cassian jogged into her line of vision, made her a hand signal that meant he would be right behind her. Jyn tilted her head in a funny way, that told him she knew he was up to something, but turned around and went in without him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _“Tiene objeciones a las decisiones de sus superiores?”_ \- "Do you have objections to your superiors' decisions?"
> 
> _“Sí, su alteza. Jyn estaba dirigiéndose a la base para buscar su padre. El bombardeo empezó antes que ella pudiese adentrar a las instalaciones.”_ \- "Yes, your highness. Jyn was going to the base to look for her father. The raid began before she could get into the facilities."
> 
>  _"Estén en la reunión del Consejo mañana. Presenten toda la información que usted y Sargenta Erso consiguieron en las dos misiones. Es la única esperanza de que tomemos acción."_ \- "Be at the Council meeting tomorrow. Present all the information that you and Sergeant Erso gather in the two missions. It's the only hope that we take action."
> 
>  _"Sí, su alteza."_ \- "Yes, your highness."
> 
>  _“Gracias por la información, Capitán. Voy a consultar Mon Mothma sobre otras acciones que podemos poner en corso. Yo tengo algunas ideas. Tenga um buen día.”_ \- "Thank you for the information, Captain. I'm going to consult Mon Mothma about other actions that we could put in place. I have a few ideas. Have a good day."


	16. Rogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Is there such a thing as updating too soon?
> 
> I apologize for maiming the beautiful Spanish language in my previous chapter. I can read it, understand it and speak it well enough to survive while travelling, but writing is always more complicated, and I admit I was in a hurry. I will edit that between tonight and tomorrow. On that note, my thoughts are right now with the people of Mexico and those in the Caribbean hunkering down for yet another hurricane. What a horrible day.

“Don’t talk to me.”

She had her eyes closed, but could feel him in her proximity. Knew it was him.

“Jyn.“

“Don’t.”

“Fine. But at some point-”

“I said not to talk to me.”

Cassian scampered away from her, leaving her where she was, sitting on a crate in a corner of the cargo hold with her kyber crystal in her palm, while their shuttle, SW-0608, hurtled through Yavin IV’s atmosphere. As they were getting ready for take-off, when her blood had been pumping through her veins with adrenaline and not a little bit of anger at the Council, at Cassian and at everyone else who dared look at her, Bodhi had panicked at the comlink, and had told control their call sign was “Rogue One” as she had pressured him to tell them _anything_ when they were told they weren’t supposed to be on board the ship. She had snorted derisively. Didn’t know Bodhi had such a literal streak in him.

Rogue.

They had gone rogue.

K-2SO had tremulously backed him up.

She had never thought she would see a KX security droid sound nervous and yet that was the least of the absurd things she had come across ever since Orson Krennic had moved to the apartment in front of their on Coruscant.

Jyn had endured the Council meeting by herself. Yes, Mothma had been there, as well as Draven, Bail Organa and a few other familiar faces. But Cassian had never actually shown up. She had made their case for a mission into Scarif by herself; recited her father’s message, told the entire story of how exactly they came upon the intel. Told them of Saw’s death and the destruction of NiJedha. It was all pointless, in the end. The rebellion was clearly in disarray, most systems’ representatives scared out of their wits. She had railed against them, talked about chances and choices, about now being the time to fight, to the agreement of some and the scorn of others, who had dared bring up her father’s involvement in the Weapons Program in order to discredit her. She had demanded to know, why then, she and Cassian sacrificed themselves by living dangerously for three years in Coruscant, at every turn subjected to being caught, imprisoned, and consequently killed.

It had been all for nothing. The Council never reached a consensus – and to Mothma’s, Organa’s and even Draven’s credit, they looked a bit discomfited.

Jyn, internally, mindlessly, for a few seconds railed against those noble ideas of democracy that left the Alliance stuck in a rut. For the first time in her life, she finally understood everything her stepfather said about the rebellion and that she had always attributed to his impatient and ruthless nature.

And when she had stormed out, to find Chirrut, Baze and Bodhi sitting as if waiting for her, she decided that the four of them would go to Scarif anyway – in her rage, Jyn had thought that Cassian could kriff himself, wherever he was. They had been arguing the logistics of their small number when Baze asked, in gruff manner:

“How many do we need?”

“What are you talking about?” She demanded.

The older man gestured towards something behind her. Jyn turned around and saw Cassian, a group of rebels trailing behind him, looking at her through his stupid eyelashes. If she had had the luxury of making a scene, she would have rushed up to him and shoved him or straight away punched him in the face. She still remembered waking up in his bunk with him gone without a trace, of heading into that room with a funny feeling lurking in her gut, that he was leaving her to fend for herself. This was just typical. First her parents, then Saw dumping her into the Alliance’s hands, now him. And he had seemed to get a read on her, the bastard.

“They were never going to believe you – us, I mean,” he had said, blunt as usual, the idiot.

“No thanks to you,” she bit back.

Everyone around them seemed a bit embarrassed. Chirrut was holding on his staff a little tighter than usual, Baze playing with the settings on his repeater cannon. She glanced at Bodhi and the young man looked to be slightly confused, a bit guilty, even.

Cassian stepped forward, oblivious to the men standing behind him, his eyes wide and earnest for once.

“We’ve all done horrible things, but every time I walked away from something I wanted to forget I kept telling myself it was for a cause I believed in. Jyn, I had to do something,” his voice almost – _almost_ cracked, “without this – the rebellion – I have nothing.”

“You think you’re alone in this? You didn’t think it was a good idea to let me know you were up to whatever this is?”

He had looked sideways and approached her, seemingly self-conscious.

“Can we do this later? I can explain.”

She huffed. Looked at Bodhi instead.

“It’s going to be a bit cramped, but I think – I think we can all fit in the ship,” the pilot said softly.

Jyn narrowed her eyes at Cassian, straightening her priorities. They were going to do this: run an unsanctioned mission to infiltrate an Imperial facility with no more than ten people for back up. They were more likely to not come out of it at all than otherwise. It didn’t make her any more forgiving of his letting her make a fool of herself before the Council, but time was an issue here.

That was how she was now shooing him away from her as she prayed and tried to get her temper in some semblance of restraint. It wouldn’t do to go undercover in a kriffing Imperial facility feeling the rage of an out-of-control Wookie.

Besides, she thought – and part of her admitted this was sort of childish on her part – if he had it all figured out alone, he didn’t need to come feed her whatever banthashit it was he thought would appease her.

So she let the rocking of the cargo shuttle soothe her as she kept her thoughts where she knew they mattered: avenging her father, her mother, Saw, Jedha, herself. Her mother had told her more than once to trust the Force. It was the only thing she truly hadn’t lost her faith in, in the end.

Bodhi jumped down from the ladder and quietly approached her. He reminded her of stray tooka-cats, the ones Saw would never let her keep when she was a child.

“You should hear him out,” he said, as he tugged his goggles from his head and fiddled with them.

Jyn rolled her eyes.

“I made an idiot of myself, Bodhi. He had this planned out all along.”

“There might be a chance they would sanction it. You couldn’t know for sure and neither could he. He did what he thought was right.”

“Without letting me in on it,” she mumbled, turning the crystal in her fingers. Sometimes it got warm under her shirt or in in her hand. It was strangely warmer than ever now. Surely it wasn’t because she was angry?

“For some reason he must have thought that was for the best. I’m sure there’s an explanation.”

“Bodhi, you don’t really know a lot of about us,” the young man seemed hurt for a second and she sighed impatiently, “I mean, we’ve been living together for the past three years and he’s always, always doubted me. Thought I was a loose cannon. This? This was just typical. Another day married to Cassian kriffing Andor. And you know what? I didn’t even know he was called Cassian until a few months ago. Cassian _Andor_? _–_ well, I found _that_ out the night we learned you defected. This is just a mission and he thinks I’m a liability.”

“This is _the_ mission now, Jyn. And I don’t think Cassian thinks that way. He respects you, worries about you. A lot.” Bodhi’s dark eyes, which were already ever so large, grew another reasonable amount as he said that last sentence.

“Weren’t you supposed to be flying this thing?”

“Left K-2 at it. Thought I’d check on you.”

Jyn narrowed her eyes. “Did _he_ send you here?”

He laughed, shook his head. “I had a sister, you know. Taught me how to gamble. Fell in with some smugglers and got herself killed in an ambush when I was thirteen-”

She was horrified. “Kriff, Bodhi, I’m so sorry.”

He waved a hand at her. “Sometimes you remind me of her, even if you’re shit at cards. You’re better with a blaster, though. Suppose that’s to your advantage.”

Her heart seized at this and she felt a knot form at the base of her throat. She had only just found Bodhi, this young man her father had trusted, and they were probably going to die before really getting to know each other. But then, this was war in an already violent Galaxy. Bodhi’s dead sister was proof enough of that.

He got up. Dusted the knees of his flight uniform, the one with the insignia they all hated, but that he seemed to wear out of spite.

“Talk to him.”

She nodded, her mouth a thin line. She remembered his body crashing into hers in the cargo bay of the Corellian freighter, his protective arm around her whenever he thought she needed it, the satisfied turn of his lips about a year ago at their home in Imperial Center, when she broke down and ate the Nabooian squash soup she claimed not to like but that he said would be good for her immune system.

Jyn followed Bodhi upstairs.

 

 

*

 

She had thought of coming up behind him in the co-pilot seat and smacking him in the back of the head, but she did _not_ want to give the appearance of a lovers’ spat in front of the soldiers who agreed to follow them in this suicide mission. And it wasn’t like he didn’t know she was standing behind him, after all.

“You ready to hear me out?”

Jyn tugged her hair loose from the bun she had started to tie it back in since they had been at Saw’s. Kestrel Dawn’s bangs were almost reaching her chin. She tucked them behind her ears, played with the synth rubber hair tie, diffident. Cassian turned around to look her, his chin tucked low, eyes large and more than a little beseeching.

She gestured with her head and went back the way she came from, down to the same corner of the cargo hold where she had found some semblance of solitude.

This time, though, she didn’t sit down. Stood there with practiced military ease. They were not a couple fighting. This was strictly professional.

“I needed you in the Council meeting,” he began.

She scoffed. “Glad I could be of use to you, _Captain._ ”

“It isn’t like that.”

“Then how is it exactly? Because all I can surmise from this is that, as usual, you didn’t trust me enough not to do something you thought would be stupid and sent me in there to make an idiot of myself.”

“Draven was there. I didn’t want him reading anything into your attitude. Yours or mine, really. That was why _I_ wasn’t there. He’d know something was up.”

“You overestimate Draven.”

“No, I don’t.”

No, she knew he didn’t. He had a point there, but it didn’t alleviate her anger.

“You didn’t think he’d read anything into your not being there?”

“He thinks I’m pissed over his orders. And the fact he sent me to psych eval.”

“His orders to kill my father? Wait - you were in with a psychiatrist?”

“Yes. And yes.”

She shoved her concerns for his mental health aside.

“Ah, so you being pissed with Draven is okay then? Seriously, you Alliance people.”

“He wouldn’t think anything of my not being there, but he would see that we were planning something if I let you in on it, even more if I were there with you. We’re good at what we do, but Draven is Draven.”

She wasn’t exactly sure he wasn’t full of it.

“So you were busy pulling off all this while I was in there trying to convince those people they needed to sanction what would basically be a shit ton of casualties for the rebellion?”

“I talked to Draven’s extraction team the day before, but I needed to get some planning done this morning, yes. Coordinates, weapons, the whole thing.”

She crossed her arms over her chest and sighed deeply. There was no time, really, to be this upset with him.

“I got called a lot of things in there,” she found herself saying – something she had promised herself she wouldn’t do, but then what was the use of keeping promises now?

“Your father?”

“Yes. Didn’t matter much that Organa reminded them I’ve been with the Alliance for five years now. That everyone thought my father was dead.”

Jyn saw him bite his lower lip. It was usually what he resorted to when felt guilty about anything.

“I know I should have been there, but there wasn’t time. And I’m telling you, Draven would have smelled something and we wouldn’t even have taken off.”

Jyn hated he was partially right, even he had been an nerf about it. She shook her head.

“We don’t have time for this, Cassian. Tell me what you’re thinking.”

“We see if we can get another Imp’s uniform when we arrive. I’ll dress up in Sward’s uniform, minus his IDs. We both go in with K-2 while the rest set up a distraction.”

She nodded and spent several seconds looking at his face. They had been so young when they met, even though they had already seen and lived through too much. Talking to Bodhi about him before had been hard, because she realized she knew him and at the same time didn’t. She knew little things about him, yes, his tells, how he slept, his infuriating obsession with tidiness, nutrition and – until he disobeyed Draven on Eadu – with rules. However, she hadn’t known his name for three whole years, didn’t know what had really happened to him when he was six that he joined the Rebellion, didn’t know anything, really. And yet, at the same time, knew so much.

Cassian seemed to read something in her posture, because he stepped close to her, his eyes an unasked question. She sighed again, glanced up at the ceiling. He put out a hand on her shoulder, his fingers burning the nape of her neck under her hair.

She almost leaned in. Almost. Then she remembered they were in a ship full of soldiers they were about to lead to their probable demise and that being caught necking in the cargo hold was very much in poor taste.

Besides, there was something else.

“Not here,” she said, “not now. And I’m still mad at you.”

He huffed and shut his eyes. For a brief moment, the lines she had seen time stitch around them over the past years disappeared.

“You’re right. Sorry,” he was saying.

“We have no idea what that Citadel looks like, right?”

He clenched his jaw and shook his head. She put her hand over his on her shoulder and squeezed.

When she next caught sight of Bodhi, she narrowed her eyes at him and then very quickly shot him a small smile. The young man she was beginning to think of as the brother she had never had smiled toothily at her, visibly relieved.

 

**

 

Jyn spent the rest of the trip to Scarif meditating with Chirrut. When her ears picked up the alarm that they were dropping out of hyperspace, she rushed to the cockpit, her heart beating so hard, she thought it took up the entire space of her chest. She leaned her hand on Bodhi’s shoulder.

“Okay, we’re coming in,” he said, “there’s a planet-wide defensive shield with a single main entry gate. This shuttle should be equipped with an access code that allows us through.”

“Assuming the Empire hasn’t logged it as overdue,” quipped K-2SO.

“And if they have?” She asked

“Then they’ll shut the gate and we’ll be annihilated in the cold vaccum of space.”

“Not me,” said the droid, “I can survive in space.”

Jyn just stared silently at what was supposed to be her husband’s best friend.

Cassian himself climbed into the cockpit while they maneuvered towards the gate, but stood back. Jyn at first forced herself not to look at him.

“Okay. Here goes,” said Bodhi, pressing the comm button, “cargo shuttle SW-0608 requesting a landing pad.”

This, however, was an excellent time to review her priorities. She moved out of Bodhi’s way and settled halfway between the cockpit and the ladder in the main hold. She grabbed her kyber crystal, closed her eyes again.

“Cargo shuttle SW-0608, you’re not listed on the arrival schedule,” said a voice through the comm.

“Acknowledged, Gate Control. We were rerouted from Eadu Flight Station. Transmitting code now.”

“Transmitting,” echoed K-2.

In the ensuing silence, Jyn couldn’t help herself and got up to stand next to Cassian, her hand still around her mother’s pendant.

The comm cracked a sound.

“Cargo shuttle SW-0608,” a beat, “you’re cleared for entrance.”

Bodhi let out an exclamation. She could make out Cassian having hit the durasteel paneling above them, and she, in her turn, silently leaned her head on his left arm, blowing out an amount of air she didn’t think she had held in her lungs. Cassian dropped a kiss on her head, smoothed a hand over her Alliance-issue jacket, warm and sure.

She pulled a few inches away, ruefully smiled at him. 

“I’ll go tell the others.”


	17. Scarif

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really hope this isn't boring and repetitive, but it had to be written. 
> 
> Just a few more chapters before this is done. I think.

He did _not_ want to get into what his feelings had been since he had realized that Jyn had been planning to fly to Scarif with Baze, Chirrut and Bodhi regardless of him.

Cassian was unapologetic about the way he had handled things. She knew as well as he did what the Death Star was and what it meant, and what the Alliance’s choice to capitulate implied. If she chose to be mad at his decisions it was her problem, the rational part of his brain screamed, but it had stung, it had made bile rise in his throat. They were supposed to be in this together and if they were to be felled by the Empire after all, as he had always expected he at least would, then he would want it to be whislt fighting _alongside_ _her_. His attempts to explain himself that followed, his attempts to appease her, his restraint not to shake her useless sense of pride out of her… Everything he did – and here he admitted he was being selfish and more than a bit callous – was to ensure _that_.

His brain took a ridiculous path then: if they eventually came back, if the Alliance by some ridiculous reason survived, he would have to sit down with Dr. Tarwin for more than just an evaluation. He didn’t know what he would make of him and her, separately or together, after this. He shrugged off that line of thinking, almost laughing out loud. It was no use thinking of a future if what they had been doing all along was putting themselves at risk for _a_ future not necessarily – most probably not, really – with them in it.

Cassian realized then that it was the first time in a long time that he really thought about what the end of his mission with Jyn would mean. How different it was from the vision he had when he all but regretted it: it had been the image of being comfortably back on base, back to missions with only K-2SO for company, and it occurred to him that the idea seemingly didn’t satisfy him anymore. Of course, right now even that previous vision was risible at best. There might not be a Rebel Alliance to speak of, as far as the Council was concerned, even as they left Yavin IV.

His only other hope resided on Bail Organa’s words to him when they had run into each other after his debrief. Cassian could tell the older man had a card up his sleeve 

As they approached Scarif, however, he got his opportunity to explain the reasoning behind his latest actions to Jyn and he saw that she was leaning towards forgiving him. He tried not to let the fact that she chose to lean on him in relief when they were allowed to land cloud his focus on the mission ahead. When she went downstairs to tell the others they were through, he took a few seconds to clear his head. Then he climbed down the ladder to the cargo hold, where most of the soldiers were gathered.

“We’re landing,” he said to her. Then loudly, to the men and women standing before them, “we’re coming in.”

Cassian thought it was only fair she should be the one to talk to them. She had been the one to put the case forward to the Alliance; would have been anyway had he been there with her. It was her father’s plan to sabotage the Empire; the message had been for her. She should be the agent behind lighting that fuse. Despite their difference in rank, he felt he was the one following her, even if he was the one that had amassed the squad in front of them now.

She turned to them and he could swear she had one hand on his leg as she spoke. He didn’t dare look lest he be imagining things.

“Saw Gererra used to say one fighter with a sharp stick and nothing left to lose can take the day”, she sounded uneasy being in this position, but soldiered on, “they’ve no idea we’re coming. They’ve no reason to expect us. If we can make it to the ground, we’ll take the next chance. And the next. On and on until we win… Or the chances are spent. The Death Star plans are down there. Cassian,” she took his hand, behind her back, no doubt of it now, “K-2 and I will find them. We’ll find a way to find them.”

He stepped sideways, squeezed her fingers before letting go, and looked up.

“Melshi, Pow, Baze, Chirrut. You’ll take the main squad. Move east and get wide off the shield. Find a position between the shield and the tower. Once you find the best spot, light the place up. Make ten men feel like a hundred,” he looked at Jyn, felt something clawing at his throat that sounded like laughter, “and keep those troopers away from us.”

Bodhi climbed down the ladder and landed behind them, all jitters.

“What should I do?”

“Keep the engine running,” he replied, “you’re our only way out of here.”

Because they had required a clearance code, they were bound to be inspected when they landed. It was just as well. They needed another Imp’s uniform anyway and the technician that approached the shuttle was just the right size. Bodhi let the two men aboard the ship, all genial cluelessness. When asked about the ship’s manifest, he pointed to the cargo hold, where him, Jyn and about ten other people didn’t waste time in dealing with the two men and the troopers that escorted them. Jyn pulled the deck technician’s armor over her clothes, trading her boots for his, while Cassian dressed up in the lieutenant’s uniform. She was going to say something to him as they were moving around the ship, getting ready, but Baze stopped her to say a few words to her he couldn’t make out. Cassian gripped K-2’s arm, pulled him aside.

“You watch out for Jyn. I don’t care what happens. Jyn’s your priority. Not me.”

“Cassian, you are not making any sense.”

“Just. Could you please?”

“Fine. I’ll pretend to understand human reasoning.”

“Thank you.”

Bodhi suddenly popped his head from upstairs.

“You’re clear. Go!”

First, a few of the squad left the ship, taking cover amongst what they could find around the hangar. Then, Jyn, K-2 and he walked out, striding serenely in formation to the transport that would take them to the citadel. As they boarded it, K-2 made one last remark.

“I’m right behind you, Jyn Erso.”

Cassian sighed, refrained himself from putting his hand to his face.

“Thanks?” His partner said, glancing up at the droid.

“Cassian said I had to.”

“Oh, for Force’s sake,” she mumbled.

“Will you two stop it?” He snapped.

They boarded the transport. K-2 stayed sullenly quiet – as sullenly as a droid could be, he supposed.

He told K-2 they needed a map. The droid understood what he meant by his request, but showed some reluctance to do what was asked of him. Jyn thankfully stayed out of their little bickering match; he wouldn’t know what K-2 would do if she showed any more signs of impatience. He envied her the helmet – she kept it closed while they walked through the Citadel, hiding her features, which certainly did not match Imperial deck technician Ken Deezling’s. Despite having been Sward – and before that, Willix – for over three years, he felt unusually uncomfortable in his uniform. He was trying to shut down his anxieties while K-2 harvested another KX droid for their information, when Jyn opened her helmet and looked at him with liquid eyes.

“No wonder he didn’t want to do this.”

“It’s not different from what we ourselves do,” he quipped back, much more to himself than to her.

“Yes, exactly. And look at the whole lot of good it’s done us.”

Cassian knew she had a point – _the_ point, to be more precise – but he really didn’t want to deal with his own weaknesses right now.

“Stop fidgeting,” Jyn muttered. He almost didn’t understand her as she talked through the helmet, “you’ve done this before.”

He ran hand on the stubble on his chin.

“Not so precariously.”

She rolled her eyes, reached her hand up around his fingers and eyed him meaningfully.

K-2 appeared to be done, leaving the KX droid’s emptied eyed chassis on the floor of the communications bay they were hiding in.

“Our optimal route to the datavault places only eighty-nine stormtroopers in our path. We’ll make it no more than thirty-three percent of the way before we are killed.”

Jyn looked at him, her eyes wide. Cassian had to swallow down the apology he felt like offering; she wasn’t used to K-2’s dismal statistics. However, she didn’t seem entirely frightened and turned away to look at their surroundings while he pulled him comlink from his pocket.

“Melshi. Talk to me.”

His comm crackled. _“Ready, ready. Standing by._ ”

He and Jyn looked at each other again. It was only much later that Cassian would realize he had been waiting for her order; not her concurrence, her order. So much for the dutiful Imperial wife.

She nodded at him, wide eyes filled with certainty and something else. He brought the comlink to his lips.

“Light it up.”

 

**

  

They did not die at thirty-three percent of the way. Melshi’s distraction affected the garrison enough that they moved towards the datavault without a hitch. Once they reached it, led by K-2, the droid incapacitated the technician working there with a blunt blow to the head. Jyn and him made quick work of grabbing the man so they could use his handprint to open the access to the vault.

It was no good. They tried at least three times – first him, then Jyn, then both of them holding the man’s hand together as much as each other before he gave up and yelled, impatience evident in his voice.

“This is not working, Kay!”

If droids could roll their eyes, he supposed it was what Kay was doing as he spoke, “the right hand!”

As soon as they had the man’s correct hand on the scanner, the doors opened, revealing what looked to be a complex structure. The files were stored on a tower behind a glass. How were they supposed to get to them?

They were raiding the technician for whatever else that could help them get to the files, when K-2’s voice made them jump apart. He spoke with surreal calmness, almost bemused.

“The rebel fleet has arrived.”

“What?” Asked Jyn, bewildered.

“There’s fighting on the beach,” what could pass for laughter bubbled out of Cassian while K-2’s tone grew more urgent, “they’ve locked down the base…” then the droid actually sounded solemn, “they’ve closed the shield gate.”

“We’re trapped,” Jyn said, looking at him for some measure of confirmation.

His stomach did a funny thing, but he maintained his face neutral as he nodded. Or tried to, as K-2 explained that they could transmit the plans from the tower, but that the size of the data files were never going to make through if the shield was still up.

Cassian grabbed his comlink, walked away from both of them as he got the closer he could to yelling without actually doing so for Bodhi to pick up.

“Listen to me,” he said, when the pilot answered, “the rebel fleet is up there. You’re going to tell them to blow a hole in the shield gate so we can transmit the plans.”

_“Wait. I can’t. I’m not hooked in the comms tower. We’re not tied in.”_

“It’s the only way we’re getting them out of here. Find a way!”

As he spoke, he started for the datavault. To K-2 he said, “cover our backs.”

He did not see what passed between the droid and Jyn, but he had had enough of their loitering when he noticed she didn’t follow him into the vault. He went back a couple of steps.

“Jyn, come on!”

He was painfully aware he was slowly veering towards losing control. The rebel fleet coming in was great – it meant that they weren’t entirely deserters, should they come out of this alive – but it also meant an open declaration of war on the Alliance’s part. It was a last gamble, probably without the Council’s approval, led by Organa or Mothma, which was as good as it got, because he doubted there would be much of a rebellion after they were done, should they fail. If they succeeded, it meant that their fighting would be less in the shadows, such as it was now, almost entirely dependent on the actions of people like Cassian and the men and women on the ground, actions which were responsible for his current state of mind. He glanced at the steady set of Jyn’s chin and realized the enormity of Draven’s awareness of what this job was doing to him in assigning her to be with him for the past three years. There wouldn’t have been much of him left had he been only with K-2, like most of the years he had spent undercover in Carida when he was a teenager. It was there, after all, that his desperation to feel even slightly like himself led him to pilfer a droid and reprogram it. K-2 had once, after that mission was over, offered a memory wipe following a particularly gruesome assassination. He had declined. His feelings of self-contempt were what kept him sentient.

“It’s probably Raddus,” Jyn mumbled, while her eyes scanned the console of the data vault.

“What?” He asked.

“One the few who wanted to farking do something about this.”

He only hummed in agreement.

“Organa told me he’d consult with Mothma about some other option if the Council didn’t approve the mission.”

Jyn didn’t have time to respond. K-2’s voice chirped through the comlink:

_“Schematic pack. Data tower two.”_

“How do I find them?” He asked back.

 _“Searching…”_ the droid replied, as Jyn started fiddling with the schematics that appeared on the small screen, _“I can locate the tape, but you’ll need to use the handles for extraction.”_

He pulled his lieutenant hat off. Jyn was looking at him expectantly, so he ran a hand through his hair to get rid of the tension. There were two handles on the glass, which he grabbed and turned on at what he supposed were the right buttons.

“What am I supposed to do with this?” He asked himself out loud.

He figured that Jyn was probably thinking he had blown a fuse in his head.

The mechanism that would allow him to select the tape moved way too fast, but he quickly found the right measure of movement in the handles. All he had to do was wait for Jyn to find the file. However, the door to the vault slowly starting shutting behind them. It was like a bucket of ice fell through the collar of his uniform jacket, down his back.

He unthinkingly picked up the comlink, “Kay, what is going on out there?”

Jyn eyed him furiously and in disbelief. Whatever it was that was going on, he had probably given them away to who or whatever had Kay concerned about them outside. He pressed his lips together and hoped she understood it as the apology it was. She turned her eyes back to the screen in front of her, to the hundreds of schematics passing before her eyes.

There was no measuring system capable of grasping the amound of self-loathing he felt. He was definitely losing it.

Jyn started rattling the names of the file repositories out loud, so he came to stand at her shoulder to try and at least be useful.

“Hyperspace tracking… Navigational systems…” She started to sound frustrated.

Whatever had happened outside, Kay sounded more in control now.

 _“Two screens down. Structural engineering. Open that one._ ”

She did. It had a ridiculous amount of files.

“Project code names,” her voice rang out with a lot more confidence as she rushed through them, “Stellar Sphere, Mark Omega, Pax Aurora…”

As she read them, he found himself zoning out, just watching her lips move, how wisps of hair fell out of the tight bun she had tied her hair in so it didn’t interfere with the technician helmet. It felt almost bittersweet, watching her do something they had done countless times, alone and together, just waiting for her signal, monitoring their comlink. Her voice grew softer, tired.

“…War Mantel, Cluster Prism, Black Saber…”

She came to a halt, lifted her head a bit. He leaned over to her, hands tight on the handles, and tried to read the file. The aurebesh letters came into focus just as she read the word out loud.

“Stardust,” his own voice pronounced, the same time as she did.

He felt the edges of a smile in his own lips. Leaned over a bit more and pressed a tight kiss to her head.

“Stardust,” he repeated, his voice husky with the tightness he felt in his throat. Of course her father would call a project whose plans she was supposed to find with that name.

He picked up the comlink.

“Kay, we need the file for Stardust.”

The droid’s voice sounded a bit cloggled through the com, but he was quick to reply.

“Stardust.”

A bright green light started blinking the data tower, pointing to the tape. His heartbeat was flooding his ears as Jyn said, “that’s it.”

His hands were surprisingly steady on the handles as they directed the mechanism to retrieve it. Just as the tape ejected, however, the lights in the vault shut down with a loud hum.

“Kay,” he said, looking up as the lights flickered on again.

 _“Climb”_ , the droid said, his voice slow through the sound of blaster shots, _“climb. You can still send the plans to the fleet. If they open the shield, you can broadcast the plans through the tower.”_

He felt his heart constricting. He knew this mission was probably going to end up with all of them dead, but droids weren’t supposed to die. Kay was supposed to be there and ensure Jyn at least got through with the plans. He wasn’t supposed to be the first of them to go.

 _“Locking the vault door now,”_ Kay’s voice cracked.

“Kay!” He found himself yelling, walking away from the handles he had been gripping for the past ten minutes, “ _Kay!”_

 _“Goodbye_.”

The vault door locked, one of the most awful sounds he heard in his entire life other than his mother’s cries when his father was killed. His legs failed underneath him and he slid to the floor, for brief seconds mindless of Jyn’s presence behind him. He propped himself against the wall, his hands curled in fists.

She squatted before him, much like the night when he had killed Zayz, only her wrists now bore the tightened sleeves of a technician’s uniform and not the loose-fitting blouses and dangling bracelets of Kestrel Sward. Her eyes, though, were all compassion, much more than that night. She cupped the back of his head, pressed her lips to his forehead.

“I’m sorry, darling,” she muttered, and his heart did something funny at the endearment, for once not used sarcastically or out of duty.

“I know,” he rasped, “just…”

“Five seconds,” she said, her tone sweet, but stern.

He nodded.

“This was all my fault. If I weren’t-“

“Cassian, we don’t have time for this. Kay said we needed to climb. We need to get Bodhi and see if they’ve blown that shield up.”

He picked up his comlink, still sitting down.

“Bodhi, are you there? Did you comm the fleet?”

 _“I can’t get to the shuttle”_ , the pilot replied, through some kind of hell of his own, _“I can’t plug in.”_

He finally found strength to get up. Jyn moved away, leaning over the console to examine the glass separating them from the data tower.

“You have to. They have to hit that gate,” he was aware he sounded desperate, “if the shield’s open, we can send the plans.”

He walked over to the glass and started inspecting it as well, trying to get a sense of how much they would have to climb and how far would they fall if something happened.

Jyn’s voice rang with surety from behind him.

“Step back.” 

A shot went past him and smashed the glass. They both stood in silence, only listening as the shards echoed in the abyss below.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My take on Cassian speaking on the comm to K-2 when the 'troopers arrive at the vault was that he was so emotionally compromised at this point that he did stuff he would never otherwise do. In normal circumstances, I think Cassian would have waited for Kay to get back to him. Please don't kill me.


	18. To die with you

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm obviously not done with these two. 
> 
> I'm also obviously not a doctor. Ignore anything that doesn't make any sense.

They lost K-2. Jyn’s heart, which she thought was already quite broken over the events of the past weeks, cracked again upon listening to the droid’s voice outside the vault door. His last words rang in her ears – not the fading goodbye he had just uttered – but what he had said to her before she went into the vault after Cassian, after she had handed him a blaster.

“Your behavior, Jyn Erso, is continually unexpected.”

Apparently, not even Cassian had ever let him handle a blaster before and therefore she had shown a measure of trust in him that few had done until now. He had died wielding it in her and Cassian’s defense. It was not something easy to deal with.

She let Cassian sink to the floor, let him grieve for all of five seconds for someone she knew he had considered family after his was taken away. Mostly, she tried to keep his guilt and self-loathing at bay. Droids could be salvaged – K-2 had probably loads of back-ups back on Yavin IV – but she doubted Cassian would ever forgive himself for speaking at the comlink when he did, for the same reasons that she replayed her trek to the platform on Eadu over and over again in her head, trying to figure out where she had gone wrong.

She then shattered the glass of the data vault with one precise blaster shot. She did away with Kent Deezling’s uniform. By this point, there was nothing to explain away their actions, and with the amount of crap attached to that technician’s armor, she was never going to be able to climb the tower wearing it. Cassian, too, got rid of the Imperial jacket, which she had noticed he had been struggling with since they were back in the shuttle. Then they both jumped – she first, with Cassian following close behind –, grabbing on to the tapes for leverage. His eyes on her, fierce and faithful as she studied the distance from the viewport to the tower, were something she was never ever going to forget.

The retrieving mechanism had thankfully ejected the tape before the electricity in the vault had shut down as K-2 fought what they supposed were ‘troopers. She managed to climb to it, get a firm grip on the handle and then pulled the tape out. With the sheer force she employed, she swung backwards and almost fell. Cassian let out a yell, put out a hand as if it would be able to keep her in place, an act she knew was more for her safety than for the tape’s integrity.

“Are you okay?” He asked, as she clipped the tape to her belt.

“Yeah, yeah,” she was impressed her voice was steady.

Just as they were about to continue climbing to where K-2 had told them they could broadcast the plans from, a door hissed open.

She supposed it was predictable that Krennic would be on Scarif if he were following the trail of Bodhi’s defection and her father’s betrayal of him. But to actually see someone of such high rank deigning to come after them was slightly surreal. She had heard whispers of Imperial officers being egocentric, but other than what she knew was Palpatine’s guard dog, a man who was kept alive through more machines than even Saw, she had never heard of anyone personally involved in a chase against rebel agents. Cassian yelled for her again, pulled his blaster out and started firing. She knew she should have kept climbing while he dodged the shots, but she was paralyzed, watching as he brought down two deathtroopers with relative ease.

 _That’s it,_ Jyn thought, even as she came close to shaking with how hard her heart was beating, _that’s it,_ _my dearest deadly sniper_.

And then everything for her came to standstill.

A shot from Krennic himself hit Cassian and he fell, without a single sound from his lips. His body hit one durasteel beam, then another, with sickening cracks. He came to rest with a crashing echo at the first platform she could see, several meters below, one of his legs bent in a funny angle. He wasn’t moving. She was aware of his name being ripped from her throat and later she would wonder why Krennic didn’t take the opportunity to simply shoot her in the head. She figured, though, that her entire ordeal - seeing the man she had woken up next to in the last three years lying dead without her being able to touch him or at least say goodbye - must have lasted only seconds.

An unspeakable measure of grief clawed at her chest – she had to force air in and out of her lungs with what she felt was her entire body’s strength – and then, as for some reason Krennic had stopped shooting, she climbed up, as fast she could. Yes, in the mess that was her heart, she felt like she could die right then without a care in the world, but first she had her father’s vengeance and the Galaxy’s safety to attend to.

Then, if she could, she would go after Cassian and try to get his body out of that Force-forsaken place; it was enough that she hadn’t been able to bury her parents.

It wasn’t easy getting to the top. She had to jump through an airshaft with a trap door that could have taken out one of her limbs, but she did it, thanking the Force as she made it to the top unscathed.

With her heartbeat echoing in her ears, she looked for the console where she could transmit the plans. Upon finding it, with shaking fingers she unclipped the tape from her belt and placed it on the machine. However, a clear mechanical voice told her she had to realign the antenna before she could broadcast anything. Jyn looked around her and found the console that she supposed would direct the antenna at the edge of a catwalk, amid the blaster fire and the thick smoke of the battle raging below and above her. As she launched herself in its direction, blaster in hand, she muttered prayers that the shield was finally blown – otherwise, this would all be for nothing. Cassian and K-2’s deaths would all be for nothing.

It took a while for the dish above her to rotate to its correct position, but when it did, the same voice that rang from the console on the tower spoke again, through the noise of the TIE fighters and the Rebel fleet around her.

 _“Antenna aligned. Ready to transmit_.”

Jyn bit her lip and thought of her father’s face wet with tears and Eadu’s rain, and twisted the switch that would guarantee the broadcast. As she was getting ready to walk back, an Imperial fighter spotted her on the catwalk and started flying her way, shooting. The blaster in her hand was rendered useless and the antenna’s orientation control was blown to smithereens, shot after shot hitting the catwalk as the fighter pursued her. A particular blast right in front of her sent her careening down and backwards in the collapsing bridge, her shoulders screaming as she managed to hang on to the beams on the left and not fall over.

When she got up, heaving with the force of carrying her own weight up, she felt a burst of pain from left ankle as she put her foot down. She grabbed the rail next to her and limped as fast she could back to the transmitting console. There was smoke everywhere, the smell of burnt ozone scorching through her nostrils as it became harder and harder for her to breathe.

She was, however, brought to a halt when Krennic himself appeared before her, pointing a blaster in her direction. When she saw herself trapped between the man behind her parents’ disappearance and a catwalk on the edge of collapse, she knew this was it. And for all her time spent in the Galaxy scrambling to survive, and the myriad of pain she was in – both physically and emotionally - Jyn knew she had to hold herself together in front of this man.

Krennic’s blue eyes widened upon seeing her, mimicking her reaction when she had seen him for the first time on Coruscant in what seemed very long ago. She smiled fiercely at him, thought she could put on Kestrel’s saccharine tone, but she was too bruised, too angry and too sad to do so.

“Kestrel?” he demanded, likely too indignant at his own stupidity upon finding that his comely young neighbors were spies. "Who are you?"

She took a step forward, kept her voice only loud enough to be heard over the wind and the fight going on around them.

“You know who I am.”

“No,” he barked, “you’re not who I thought you were.”

She actually laughed, thinking that she probably sounded a bit hysterical at this point.

“Not your friend Kestrel, no. Neither the man you just killed was your friend Joreth.”

Krennic stood there silent, blaster still trained on her, eyes entirely a bit too sad. For some reason, the fighting in the sky and on the ground came to a stop. All that she heard was the catwalk she was on groaning in the sea wind. She faced Krennic head on, chest open and chin up.

“I’m Jyn Erso, daughter of Galen and Lyra. You’ve lost, _Orson_.”

He seemed to gather himself a bit, “oh, I have, haven’t I?”

“My father’s revenge. He built a flaw in the Death Star,” she figured Bodhi would be proud of her if she bluffed a bit, “he put a fuse in the middle of your machine and I just told the Galaxy how to light it.”

Krennic seemed optimistic about his odds, even though he was edging closer to tears. She really, really hoped Bodhi had come through for them down there.

“The shield is up,” he said, “your signal will never reach the Rebel base. All these ships here will be destroyed. I lose nothing, but time. You, on the other hand, die with the Rebellion.”

He was going to shoot and she braced for it, sending a prayer up that it would hit her in the right place. And yes, there was a blaster shot and she was certain it had hit her, except she wasn’t feeling anything – for a second she thought it was sheer shock alone. Krennic fell, then, miraculously, his cape spreading on the tower platform like a puddle, clearing the way for her to see behind him.

It was Cassian, leaning against a pillar, looking so broken and so beautiful she could cry.

Jyn hurled herself to the console, regardless of what she faintly suspected was a broken ankle, and pulled the lever to transmit the plans. Upon hearing the confirmation of the signal, she turned to smile at Cassian, the corners of her eyes prickling from it.

She rushed to see if he was okay as he kept the blaster pointed at the fallen man before them. His breath was faltering, he had tiny cuts all over him, and he could barely stand on his own two feet, entirely too dependent of the pillar he was leaning against. She was filled with such rage, then, she turned to Krennic and decided to end him even if he was dead already.

She felt Cassian huff a laugh, put his hand on her shoulder and then grab at her arm when she leaned towards the Imperial officer, a grunt escaping her lips.

“Leave it,” he rasped, “leave it.”

She restrained herself, closed her eyes, and leaned against the man who had saved her in more than one sense.

“That’s it,” he said, his breath hitting her cheek, nose bumping against her face, “that’s it… let’s go.”

She was painfully aware he didn’t say exactly where. She put his arm around her shoulders and let him put his weight on her, even if her ankle screamed with the pain.

“Do you think anyone’s listening?” he asked and she felt warmth flood her chest at the sound of his accented voice, which she thought she would never hear again.

“Yeah,” she said, felt herself smiling through the effort of dragging them both away, “someone’s out there.”

They found a turbo lift, which was probably what Krennic had used to reach the top of the tower. They limped inside and she propped Cassian against the wall, listening to the odd sounds coming out of his chest, which meant some of his ribs were broken. As the lift moved, she watched him, watched the light move over his features; they were so, so soft as he looked at her, the softest she had ever seen him, even compared to the mornings on Coruscant, when he thought she wasn’t awake and he would watch her sleep for a while before getting out of bed. Something in her threatened to snap, a knot formed at her throat as she realized what was going through his mind.

He thought he was dying, she was sure of it, and she felt herself breathing harder with despair at that notion.

She slipped a hand around his neck, stepped closer to him.

“Jyn,” he whispered, took a second to swallow, “Jyn.”

“Shh,” she said, “don’t. Don’t talk.

She wasn’t about to let him say what she thought he was going to say. Apparently, he understood. Just touched his mouth to her hairline. She put hers on his jaw, gently, as if he would break with such a touch.

The lift came to a halt, the doors opened, and they were left with the view of a finished battle. The Imperial troops had apparently pulled away. Bodies were strewn all over the place. She didn’t want Cassian to see them; he was already too overcome with guilt already.

“What do you want to do?” She asked, because she had no idea how they were supposed to walk back to the landing pad.

“I lost the comlink in the fall,” he said, his voice cracking with pain, “I’ve no way to know if Bodhi’s at the ship. No way to know if he’s even alive.”

“We’ll go to the beach then,” she suggested, figuring that at the wide expanse of white sand they would be easy to spot, but decided not to tell him that, saying instead, “we’ll watch the sunset.”

He only nodded, huffing a laugh that was visibly too painful to let out.

They trudged away in the sand, to the edge of the water, far away so that errant waves wouldn’t hit them, but close enough to feel refreshed by the sea spray. She figured his legs were also the problem, as he awkwardly fell to his knees. Jyn dropped his grip on him, but leaned against him as she sat down next to him. She then pressed a kiss to the top of his head as she did so and took one of his calloused hands in her gloved ones.

He was breathing harder. She didn’t know what she would do if they didn’t get any help soon.

Cassian turned to say something to her and she looked up at him warningly, as if telling him not to go overboard. She wasn’t sure she was going to be able to handle any sort of declaration or attempted goodbye.

“Your parents would have been proud of you, Jyn.”

The lump in her throat threatened to suffocate her. She was so overcome with it all, so emotionally and physically exhausted, she wasn’t sure the ground was shaking or if she was trembling all over.

“It’s the Death Star again,” she heard him whisper.

He sounded almost relieved and she felt herself momentarily rage at him. But that was apparently it. There was a limit on escaping that thing and not having a ship nearby meant that there was nothing she could do. She breathed in and out slowly, thought of the Force, of her parents and of the fact that she had Cassian by her side. The prospect before of her dying and him being left behind on that tower had been so terrible… She felt warm inside now and huddled close to him, shut her eyes for a brief moment, feeling tears escape the corner of her eyes, and she gripped her kyber crystal. 

And then, from behind her, came the deafening roar of a shuttle, the clanging sound of a boarding ramp being lowered. She turned back, almost knocking Cassian sideways.

It was their cargo shuttle.

 

**

 

It was such a burst of adrenaline coursing through her that Jyn leapt to her feet regardless of the pain in her left leg and of her bruised shoulders. Cassian was babbling nonsense, half of which she didn’t understand, something about her going and leaving him there, and if he weren’t so obviously going through some sort of delirium, she would have smacked him in the mouth.

“Bodhi!” she screamed at the top of her lungs, “I need help with Cassian!”

It was Corporal Stordan Tonc who came out instead, his uniform dark red all over, eyes almost out of their sockets, running on as much of a rush as Jyn was. He started picking Cassian up, slinging one of his arms over his neck.

“His back! We have to be careful with his back!” She was pretty sure she sounded like a raging lunatic.

Tonc practically shoved her inside the ship, as an angry wave started to welt on the horizon. She was reminded of the wall of rock and debris moving in their direction on Jedha and tried to swallow down the Force-awful taste that coursed through her mouth.

Jyn stood still on the cargo hold, thanking the Force for the steady hum of the ship under her feet, as Tonc half carried Cassian inside and locked the ramp, yelling upstairs that they could be off. There was no one else inside; only the three of them. There was, however, blood everywhere. She felt suddenly dizzy and fell to her knees.

“Where’s-“

“I have to go help Bodhi,” said Tonc, breathing as though he had just run a hundred laps around the Massassi temple and depositing Cassian gingerly on her lap, “he’s doing this one-handed.”

“What-“

“He picked up a grenade and threw it back at the troopers, the crazy son of a bitch.”

Jyn was left holding Cassian on her knees as Tonc climbed upstairs.

They would have to get settled if they were going to break through atmo and then jump to hyperspace. Jyn put her hands under Cassian’s armpits and as carefully as she could, made her way to that same corner where she had made a bed for herself with the blankets from their Corellian freighter. He seemed to be unconscious, but as soon as she had them both settled, with him lying along her legs, and she felt the ship picking up speed upwards, he opened his eyes.

“Jyn,” he breathed more than spoke.

“Don’t talk. I’m going to hold on to you until we’ve made the jump or something, and then I’m going to look for a medkit. I’m pretty sure I grabbed something on Eadu.”

“You’re bleeding, Jyn,” he hardly opened his mouth to speak

“No, that’s not my blood. I-“, she swallowed, or tried to; her mouth was dry, “I think that’s Bodhi’s.”

He tried to lick his lips and she saw that he was the one who had blood in his mouth.

_Kriff._

“Cassian, hold on, okay?” she felt queasy, “hard part’s over. We’re getting out. I just need you to hold on until I can get up.”

She distracted herself by looking over his body and trying to catalogue what she could see that was wrong with him and what she would eventually need to find in their supplies. Some of his ribs were broken, as she was pretty sure was his leg. By the rattling in his chest and the blood on his teeth, he had more than likely collapsed a lung and was bleeding internally. She had no idea what could have happened to his spine.

“Do your legs hurt?” it was a pretty stupid way of trying to figure that out.

“Everything hurts.”

Jyn moved over him, careful not to bump anywhere, and managed to pull off his boot off the leg she thought was fine. She ran a finger over his socked foot. It twitched the barest amount and she let out a breath she didn’t know she was holding. When she sat back, her vision blacked out a bit, but she breathed in and out for a few seconds, leaning against the wall of the cargo hold. Her ears rang with a sound similar to the insects that sang at dusk back on Yavin IV.

The ship then lurched beneath her. It probably meant they had found a hyperspace lane that wasn’t packed with retreating Imperial fighters.

Tonc came down the stairs after she didn’t know exactly how long. Jyn noticed he was limping a bit and had a bacta patch visible under his shirt. Otherwise, he seemed calmer than before. Until his eyes fell on her.

“Sergeant, you’re bleeding.”

_This again?_

He fumbled with something that looked like a medkit.

“Sergeant, your leg,” said Tonc, sounding urgent.

She looked down then and saw that a huge portion of one leg of her uniform was wet. She fingered it, faintly thinking it was water, until she lifted her hand and saw it was bright red. Looking back down, she saw that what was her blood had seeped from her uniform onto Cassian’s shirt where he was lying against her.

_So that’s what he meant._

She was cut somewhere down along her left leg, the same one that hurt like hell because of her ankle. Tonc sat in front of her and started fumbling with the laces in her boot.

“You need to help Cassian,” she mumbled, black spots crowding her vision.

“You’re bleeding out and you’re easier to fix. If I get you patched up, we can both take care of him together.”

When he pulled her left boot off her foot, she wasn’t able to hold on any longer, and with a feeble attempt to grab on to Cassian’s shirt, she passed out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was a pain to write, really. I'm so glad the RO bits are over.


	19. Sleep

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, not a doctor. Basing this on my own experiences as a lousy patient. 
> 
> Thank you so much for reading and commenting. You are all very sweet.

Cassian woke up dimly aware of what sounded like an alarm, someone or something saying “no” repeatedly to him and cold metallic hands stopping him from trying to turn on his left side. Disoriented, he tried to wet his lips, but his mouth was dry and sticky with the taste of bacta and as he moved, he felt some indistinct dull ache on different parts of his torso, too diffuse for him to identify precisely where. His eyes were still closed and he blearily tried to open them just as he started to smell the mixture of bacta and rubbing alcohol around him.

He was in a bed in a medbay and there was a droid being shrill with him.

“Captain Andor,” it said, with a condescending tone he supposed must have been the programmer’s idea of a good bedside manner, “you cannot lay on your side. It will put pressure on your healing ribs and lung.”

He felt something annoying on his nose and moved to scratch it. The droid nearly had a fit again, swiped his hands away from his face.

“You are being given extra oxygen to help with your collapsed lung, sir. Don’t pull at the cannula, please.”

Cassian was too tired and too confused to argue with the B1 unit. He just lay back on his pillow trying to fully wake up. They had made it out of Scarif; that much was obvious, and his head swam as he tried to remember what had happened once he had realized that the Death Star had just fired once again on a planet he was on. He recalled almost welcoming that realization and then instantly regretting it because it meant that Jyn was going to die with him, and he wanted her very much alive. All his life he had trained to be an intelligence operative; to lurk in the shadows, to be cautious, and sacrifice himself for their fight. He hadn’t been able to do his job very well in the past few months; his giving themselves away and turning the stormtroopers outside the vault on his best friend was the final nail on that coffin. But Jyn. Jyn should live to fight on.

His entire body ached and he didn’t know exactly if those pains were real or psychological ones because of his regrets. With a sudden burst of anxiety, he tried to move again and found out his right leg was in a splint.

The droid didn’t say anything this time, just emitted a sound similar to someone clucking their tongue and put out a hand again to keep him in place before scampering off.

He was suddenly left alone and he decided that best course of action was going back to sleep. He was just trying to settle on his pillows, which he found were annoyingly too high, when a Chiss doctor made its way to him, a datapad in hand.

“Good to see you are awake, Captain Andor,” she said softly, and handed him a cup of water with a straw for him to drink from.

He nodded curtly as he drank, finding himself slightly sleepier than he was a few seconds before. On his peripheral vision, he could make out the annoying droid that had been restraining him before, and suspected his fiddling with the console on the side of the bed had something to do with his dimming ability to focus.

“I’ll give you a run down of your injuries and will tell you of your prognosis. Then I’ll let you go back to sleep,” upon his managing what passed for another nod, she continued, “you broke two ribs on your left side, which punctured your lung. Those will heal fully with another bacta immersion. We had to operate you in order to replace two of your vertebrae, which were broken and threatening to injure your spine. Your leg was broken in three different places. We put pins to hold those fractures together, because we are running dangerously low on bonesetters, so you are now immobilized until we can take these pins surgically off. Bacta will also help with that; it already has healed the blaster wound you had on your side.”

She checked to see if he was still awake and smiled slightly at him.

“You will fully recover, Captain,” she said, “but you need to help yourself: no moving around. If you’re uncomfortable, call us and we’ll try to make this as easy as possible for you.”

He swayed his head back and forth, eyes drooping.

“Do you have any questions?”

He tried to shake himself slightly awake, cleared his previously parched throat, and felt the words leaving his mouth of their own volition.

“Where’s – where’s my wife?”

The doctor’s eyebrows perked up and she moved to look at the datapad in her hand.

“You don’t have a spouse listed on our system, Captain. But I’ll check if these are overdue.”

He almost didn’t hear that reply before falling back asleep.

 

**

The next time he woke up, he felt a bit less confused, but this time his entire body was wracked with pain. He heard the same alarm that had woken him the first time around and he figured it was some warning mechanism for the nurses and med droids. It hurt to breathe and every stab of pain made him more agitated, which in turn made breathing harder. He felt someone rub his back, adjust his pillows and help him lower himself against them, fiddling with the console next to his bed.

“Easy, uh, Captain, slow breaths and it will hurt less.”

“No kidding,” he said, keeping his eyes screwed shut.

He opened them and saw a young woman dressed in scrubs, her eyes gray and her hair a sharp blue. She picked up a datapad next to his bed and started typing on it.

“How long…”

“How long since you were brought in?”

He nodded.

“Two days, sir. We weren’t expecting you to take so long to wake up, but I guess you needed the rest.”

He tried wetting his lips, feeling again the taste of bacta in his mouth. The young woman helped him to a cup of water and he felt marginally better.

“Who else made it?” He asked, and felt his heartbeat increase as soon as the words left his mouth.

“You were brought in a shuttle with Corporal Tonc, Sergeant Erso and Bodhi Rook. They all sustained injuries, but you and Mr. Rook were the worse off, sir. He is also expected to recover as well as possible. Corporal Tonc and Sergeant Erso have already been discharged.”

He felt something loosen in his chest which he didn’t know was tightened, but his stomach was still lurching.

“Were we the only ones-“

“I’m afraid, so, sir.”

He closed his eyes, tried to take a deep breath, but that sent a fresh twinge of pain in his ribs. It was a bit duller this time. He supposed she had upped his dose of painkillers. She lowered the back of his bed a bit, but put another pillow under his head.

“My name is Alerona, Captain. I’m a volunteer nurse,” she placed something in his palm, “Dr. Vitaan told me once you seemed alert enough that I could give you this – it’s so you can control your pain medication.”

He nodded, already feeling slightly fuzzy again, tried to move his lips to thank her, but nothing came out. This was starting to annoy him, but the pull of sleep seemed irresistible.

 _I need to talk to Draven_.

“I don’t know who that is, sir, but Dr. Vitaan has some very strict rules regarding visitors, especially when it concerns superior officers.”

He had no idea he had spoken out loud. Cassian was dimly aware of a med droid approaching him and checking over his bandages and splint, but he was already out like a light the minute it started prodding his broken leg.

**

Cassian dreamed he was underwater, in the sea, back on Scarif. The water was warm and clear and Jyn was with him, except he couldn’t really see her. It was bits of her: an ankle, her loose hair, a flash of her midriff. He was undressed and painfully aware of it, whereas she had her fatigues on at least, which he saw billow past him for a confusing second. Every time he came close to grabbing on to her, he lost his bearings and she slipped away. He felt more alarmed at his nakedness than at the fact that he was holding his breath this whole time, and he woke up when something or someone shoved him towards the surface and he found himself above what was bacta instead of water, with a respirator on his face, and the typical noises of the bacta tank echoing in his ears.

The droids tending to him registered that he was awake and must have judged it more adequate that he be put to sleep again, because the next time he came to, he was back in bed, warm and dry, and this time wearing something that was a bit more dignified than a hospital gown: they were Alliance issue underclothes, really, which his still foggy mind explained by the presence of the two people at the foot of his medbay bed.

Davits Draven was fiddling with a datapad and Mon Mothma was being her usual serene self, her light eyes set on his features searchingly. He wondered if they had ordered him awake, because his superior officers simply didn’t do courtesy visits, and he knew right away that something was wrong. In his befuddled state of mind, his immediate fear was that it had something to do with Jyn.

But Cassian was a good soldier and he didn’t speak out of turn. So he just stayed silent, waiting for him to be addressed.

“Andor, it is good to see you are recovering.”

 _Am I?_ He didn’t feel much pain anymore, only a dim ache in his lower back, but that could be attributed to the console he was still hooked to. His breathing was easier and a casual touch to his nose told him that he was off the extra run of oxygen. His leg was still immobilized and he could see the pins sticking from it in two different points below his knee and one above, though. He only nodded in response.

“We just wanted to let you know that the Alliance Council decided that you will not be subjected to any disciplinary measure for your actions” said Mothma, her eyebrows raised in a way that let him know exactly what she thought of having to deliver such a message.

Draven was unreadable, as always.

“Thank you, ma’am,” a droid put a cup in his hand – he was honestly tired of waking up feeling like had slept munching on a sock – and he took a sip of water before speaking further, “may I ask if the plans were received by the Alliance?”

“Yes, they were, but there were… complications.”

He felt something bolt through his spine and he would have sat up further if his body hadn’t been so sluggish.

“I’m sorry?”

Draven cleared his throat. “Princess Leia was with our fleet. She was relayed your transmission, but the entire fleet was attacked following their attempt to escape the Death Star. The ship was boarded and the princess has been captured. The plans’ location is unknown at the moment.”

His ears started to ring and he hoped he wasn’t having a stroke. He thought of the princess, whom he had trained to be lethal with a gun and inscrutable in interrogations but who had also smiled fondly at him and offered him biscuits the last time he saw her. His swallowed dry again.

“Why are you telling me this?” he asked, because none of it made sense.

There was nothing he could do about it with his leg trespassed by Force knew how many pins and the sheer amount of dope they had coursing through his body to make sure he didn’t lose his mind with the pain of it.

“We cannot, at this moment, risk contacting Bail Organa,” said Mothma, “the Empire will be surveying our every possibility of communicating with him. Before he went back to Alderaan, right after the Council meeting, he spoke to me about a possibility.”

Cassian shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts.

“The last I saw of him was _before_ the meeting. He only said he didn’t have much faith in the Council approving a mission to Scarif,” if he weren’t so farking respectful, he would have laughed in their faces, “he mentioned he was going to consult _you_ about alternatives, ma’am, but he wasn’t specific.”

Mothma’s face fell.

“He didn’t mention anything to you? Or anyone? Or any _where_ as a matter of fact?”

“No, I’m sorry.”

He wished his head was working in optimal conditions, really, but that line of thinking briefly reminded him of K-2SO and something sharp poked in his chest at the thought. The painkillers were the least of his problem. He had been faltering since way before this.

“Andor, you served as a courier for Organa for years,” said Draven, “I know you’re not at your best, but-“

“Tatooine,” the word simply slipped from his mouth.

“I’m sorry?” Draved asked.

“In two different occasions I helped the Senator make contact with someone on Tatooine. It had to be deeply covert and he would never give many details other than what was strictly necessary. It was off Alliance books, sir, and I never asked any questions.”

Mothma’s eyes widened as he spoke, as if what he was saying made sense to her somewhat. She looked to Draven, gave him a curt nod and he started typing furiously on his datapad. Cassian felt slightly relieved at being marginally useful, even if bedridden. The med droid standing next to him chirped something and he realized he had moved as if to get out of bed in his addle-minded state.

“Andor, you have to recover,” said Draven, “the doctor here has been very particular about you. You’re not to get out of the bed until so ordered.”

He swallowed, “you realize how I might find this difficult, sir, especially with what you’ve just told me.”

“Yes, I do. We have people on it, though.”

“People died, sir. Good people.”

Mothma moved closer to his bed. She seemed to glide as she did so, an impression he knew he usually had and not one that could be attributed to the painkillers.

“We will not let the sacrifice of the men and women you led onto Scarif be in vain, Captain.”

He thanked whatever shred of his training he had left for being able to pretend that he believed her. He took a deep breath, grimaced when it tugged at his ribs, and asked the question he was dreading.

“General, may I know where Sergeant Erso is and what is her condition?”

Draven didn’t even bother acting surprised.

“She was discharged from medbay a day after you arrived, as she sustained lighter injuries. She had a broken ankle, a tear on a shoulder ligament, and she had lost a lot of blood from a cut to her lower leg. She is in recovery, but we were saving up on beds in case there were anymore survivors.”

Cassian nodded. The question of whether she had been in to see him stung on the tip of his tongue, but for once he managed to curtail his mouth.

“We’ll let you know if anything comes up from the information you just gave us, Captain.”

At this, Mon Mothma bowed her head silently at him, before starting for the medbay door. He mirrored the gesture and after his superior officers were gone, he tried to lie back on his pillows. He felt exhausted, all of a sudden, and queasy.

“The nausea you are experiencing is a side-effect of the bacta treatment you are undergoing,” reported the droid next to him, “I could give you something to alleviate it.”

He soundlessly assented to whatever it was the stupid thing would do to him. For the first time in his life, he had to face the fact that he had no control over the situation he was in.

He closed his eyes and willed himself back to sleep.

 

*

 

The worst thing about it was not having any notion of time. It was dark in the medbay when he next woke up, having to recall that the conversation with Draven and Mothma had not been a dream. The clock in his monitors said it was 04:56 in the morning, but he had no idea if days had gone by since the last time he had been awake. He tried to sit up and his body only slightly protested at the movement, but nothing compared to the pain exploding in his nerve endings of before. He turned to look at his surroundings and for the first time saw the empty beds, the starkly polished floors, the humming of the equipment attached to his body.

And then he saw it – the smallish cot next to his bed on the floor.

He would have mistaken it for a random pile of bedclothes, but there was a shock of dark matted hair escaping the bundle of white sheets and blankets, and a small pale foot sticking out from the other side. He found himself slightly exasperated, because it looked cold – it always boggled his mind, why medbays and hospitals were so cold –, and there she was, not wearing any socks. At least on that one foot she wasn’t.

“Jyn.”

She jumped awake, with a gasp for air as if she had been diving. She sat up, her hair all askew, eyes blinking furiously, and looked at him like he had scared the living daylights out of her.

“What is it? Is anything wrong? Do you need me to call-“

He cut her off. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

She gathered herself, calmed her breathing. But before he could lecture her on appropriate footwear, a med droid rolled in.

“What is this?” it asked, when encountering something on its way to check on his vitals.

“I was allowed to sleep here,” said Jyn, looking at it like she was figuring out how to short its circuits in the least painful way possible, “ask your superior tomorrow.”

Cassian bit back a smile.

She leveled a glance at Cassian. “Alerona,” she said, as if that was self-explanatory.

He shrugged and put on a voice he hadn’t used in months. “She’s my wife. She’s just worried about me.”

The droid seemed to buy it. It went over the scans for his vitals and seemed satisfied that he didn’t seem either agitated or in any pain. It rolled away muttering something neither of them bothered to catch.

Jyn stretched on the cot and by doing so, he saw that she had a bandaged right foot where the other was bare. Apparently, her ankle hadn’t needed the pins his leg had demanded. She had tiny cuts on her forearms that seemed healed over, which he managed to see in the dim light, and she had dark circles under her eyes. Her cheeks were a bit hollow. When his eyes met hers, he found she was looking at him in the same way.

“I was going to say it was little late for you to scare me,” she said softly, moving to sit on the edge of his bed.

“I was going to say that you should be wearing socks,” he frowned at her feet again.

Something like laughter bubbled out of her and it was quickly followed by what he suspected was a sob.

“Are you alright?”

She wiped angrily at her eyes. “Cassian, for kriff’s sake, you were practically brought back from the dead, and you’re asking _me_ if I’m alright?”

He huffed. Then remembered something.

“The plans,” he said simply.

“I know. The last two days have been hell.”

“You didn’t think to go look for them?” he asked, honestly intrigued, “you seem fine. I’m… Well.”

“Couldn’t,” she said, “and wouldn’t know where to look. Draven’s not letting me in on anything. Neither is Mothma.”

“I think they’re on Tatooine,” he muttered.

“I can’t,” she said, edging closer to him.

Cassian didn’t understand what she was saying and he was too tired to ask, too glad to have her close. She reached a hand towards his face, combed the hair away from his eyes, her bangs in turn not really out of the way of hers. He felt like she was hiding something, a new sort of standoffishness that had nothing to do with their previous mission status. But for once he didn’t really want to know. Something snapped inside his chest and he realized he missed falling asleep with her.

“Stay?” he asked.

“Until they throw me out, yes.” 

He closed his eyes and fell back asleep with the feel of her fingers in his hair.


	20. Awake

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was a pain to write. I'm not entirely pleased with it, because Jyn is just confused and so am I. 
> 
> I'm going to sit down and watch ANH now because this is where we're headed. 
> 
> Yeah, I know.

Jyn came to on a hover gurney, a hoarse cry escaping her throat as Cassian was wrenched from her arms. She must have been thrashing too much for someone with her injuries, because she felt a droid’s cold fingers grab on to her arm and shoot her up with something that sent her careening back into unconsciousness.

The next time she was awake, the bed was large and so comfortable, she thought she was back on Coruscant, momentarily forgetting the last few weeks. She felt warm and for a few seconds, the most comfortable she had felt in days. But as soon as she gained some more of her consciousness, she realized her mouth tasted like bacta, she couldn’t move her left foot, and most telling of all, Cassian wasn’t by her side with his nose buried under a pile of soft expensive sheets as they had always been every morning of the past three years until they were pulled from their mission. She peeled her eyes open and managed to see that at the foot of her bed, there was a cold meal and an expectant nurse with blue hair, who seemed to look at her with an expression that told Jyn she was in between being awestruck and faced with a small little animal.

From the blinds in the clinically white medbay – a contrast to the dusty browns and muted greens of the Alliance base – she could tell it was day outside. She had the vivid impression of it being night when she was wrestled away from the ship’s cargo hold.

The young woman in front of her gently called her attention.

“Sergeant Erso,” she said, “my name is Alerona. I’m a volunteer nurse with the Alliance. Dr. Vitaan told me that when you woke up, you could eat if you’re not feeling too nauseous after your bacta immersion.”

She nodded somewhat dumbly, a handful of questions sticking to the roof of her mouth as she tried to sit up. The girl helped her with the bed settings, managing to get her upright. She looked around, with eyes that were still a bit unfocused but that managed to find Bodhi lying on the bed across from hers, in deep sleep or heavy sedation – she couldn’t tell. His face was a patchwork of small cuts and bruises, his forearm was missing entirely; there was a bandage where his arm came to an abrupt end just below his elbow. Her stomach lurched, overcome with dread, and she didn’t know how, but Alerona had a basin under her chin before she started heaving bile into it.

“Easy, Sergeant,” she said slowly, tossing the basin away on a cart after she felt like Jyn had nothing more to spit, and then went to pull a curtain around her bed.

“No,” Jyn stammered, “no, please. I need to see that he’s alive.”

She started looking around frantically and Alerona seemed to guess her concerns.

“Corporal Tonc was just discharged. He was the least hurt of you lot. Captain Andor, though, is in surgery.”

“Surgery,” she replied dumbly, her chest constricting, “will he-?”

“He should recover, but his back was severely hurt. From what Dr. Vitaan and the droid said, it was a miracle more damage didn’t happen to his spine, but they are going to replace the shattered vertebrae with prosthetic ones because of the bone fragments.”

Jyn found herself incapable of doing anything other than nodding. She tried to breathe, grabbed a cup of water next to her bed and gobbled it down.

“He was bleeding from his mouth…” she said, questioningly.

“His lung collapsed, punctured by a rib. Bacta should take care of that.”

She sagged a little with relief, but nevertheless asked what she was dreading the most.

“Were we the only ones that made it back?”

Alerona’s grey eyes said everything. Her lips tightened and Jyn nodded again, running her hands over her face, feeling under her shirt for her kyber crystal and finding it warm. _Baze. Chirrut. “Little sister”._ She couldn’t quite grasp what she had just been through. Her hands smelled of bacta. She breathed in and out a few times. She felt miserable and she felt a hollowness in her stomach. She didn’t remember when it was the last time she had eaten; back on base, before the Council meeting? On the ship, on the way to Scarif?

“What’s on that tray?” she rasped after a few seconds

Alerona smiled mournfully, “bread, cheese, some starfruit.”

“Beats the food in the mess hall,” she smiled sadly, reaching out for Alerona to hand the tray over.

“You didn’t ask about your own injuries,” the girl said, bemused.

She was already munching on the starfruit as she shrugged.

“My ankle was broken, my shoulders were hurting like a bitch and I passed out from a cut on my calf. Was there anything else?”

Alerona seemed slightly discomfited, but answered as naturally as possible, “no, that’s pretty much it. You- you should be discharged today.”

Jyn shrugged.

“Good.”

*

It actually wasn’t good, she found. She was discharged with a pair of crutches and instructions to keep her foot elevated whenever she wasn’t moving. Alerona had helped her into an Alliance uniform and to get her hair tied back into something practical. Her leg was mostly healed, an angry red welt on her skin where the bacta had helped seal the gash on her calf even after Tonc had stapled the cut shut back on the ship, or so she was told. She was given painkillers, just in case her ankle and shoulders bothered her, a pat on the back and, of course, orders. Cassian hadn’t been out of surgery yet at the time she was told to simply go.

She was to report to Draven and something told her that the fact the fleet had arrived to back them up didn’t mean they were entirely off the hook. She was told Draven was in the war room and as soon as she set foot in it, she was reminded of the cliché of feeling like one could cut the tension with a vibroblade. People were working like they were surviving on too much bad caf and little to no sleep, in a sort of quiet frenzy she felt oddly familiar with, the sort of energy the Partisans had when everything was about to be blown to hell. Draven looked like he had aged thirty years since she had last seen him, standing there muttering orders to people and seeming to talk into a comlink and type furiously into a datapad at the same time. This did not seem like a bunch of people who were analyzing the sort of intel she and Cassian had managed to send them.

She felt suddenly cold and very, very afraid.

Draven saw her, his expression belying nothing, and gestured with his head for her to follow him into a briefing room.

“Sit down, Sergeant,” he told her, and she read that as courtesy because of her leg and not because he was being particularly nice.

“I want you to know that in the end the Council chose to sanction your mission,” he began, “you are, however, grounded on base – see it as a chance to properly heal from your injuries.”

“I suppose that actually means you’re cutting me off from intel work for the duration of my ‘healing process’, sir,” she said, trying to keep the edge off her words.

“You would be correct to assume so, yes.”

She rolled her eyes, “you mean I will not be privy to the intelligence Cassian and I sent you.”

He faltered then and if her tibia wasn’t practically held together with a prayer and duratape, she would have leapt from her seat.

“You don’t have it,” she said.

“Not yet,” he admitted, oddly at peace with how much he allowed her to infer.

“The shield-“

Draven seemed reluctant to explain himself to her. He talked like he was having his teeth pulled. She suspected she could ascribe his solicitude to a certain senator from Chandrila.

“The shield was blown and the transmission received,” he said slowly, “however, the fleet suffered an attack as soon as it came out of hyperspace. We lost contact with the ship that was carrying the plans. We are trying to ascertain what might have happened to them. They were in very capable hands.”

“Whose?”

“That information, for now, I’m going to retain. There’s nothing you can do with a broken ankle and Force knows what other injuries. You’ll get some rest and _if_ you are needed in what I hope is a very long run, you will be called.”

She clenched her teeth, but nodded, feeling the weight of impotency adjust itself on her shoulders. Brawling with Draven in a briefing room when so much seemed to be happening wasn’t going to be productive if she intended to be useful at some point. Cassian was in surgery. Bodhi was unconscious. Chirrut and Baze were gone. She couldn’t very well limp away unnoticed to steal a ship on her own.

Nor, she found, did she want to.

Dismissed by Draven, she found herself a little unmoored, with nothing to do except go almost literally lick her wounds. She hobbled around base aimlessly for a while, slightly relieved that the people around her were too busy with their errands to pay her any attention. She went to the quartermaster and found she still had the same room in which she hadn’t been able to sleep the night before they set off. Then it hit her: Cassian’s quarters were bound to be empty.

It was with a sense of guilt that she casually made her way to his quarters, considering that she was taking advantage of the fact that the base was humming with the Alliance’s predicament of being in open full-blown war with the Empire at last just so she could fulfill a whim. She was sure, though, that it was one of the few things available to her short of seeing Cassian alive with her own eyes that would make her feel better. She had memorized the lock code the night she had spent there, so she quickly made her way inside, locking the door behind her.

The room was like a time capsule of the morning they had departed. Cassian had surprisingly not bothered with the bed at any point in the morning while she was in with the Council. She did find, though, something that made her heart briefly stutter in her chest: a datatape on top of his desk that hadn’t been there the previous night. She fingered it, remembering his crestfallen face as K-2SO’s voice grew slower and slower through the comm. If this was what she thought it was, it meant that she could somehow – in the future – alleviate Cassian’s pain.

She took off her clothes and buried herself under the sheets she last had a proper night’s sleep on, pretending not to catch the whiff of what she identified as _Cassian_ on them. But she couldn’t sleep, so she stared at the ceiling, nervously running her fingers on the surprisingly soft linen.

Every time she thought she got a grasp on what was going on with her, something happened that made her comprehension slip away. This time, it was survival. Her survival instead of others’ in a sense that didn’t leave her feeling relieved in a “them or me” scenario. This was different. This hurt way too much. Which was not to say that she hadn’t put herself in danger to save others before, or cared exclusively about her own skin the past, but it had never been like this, and she felt overwhelmed.

Lying there wondering if Cassian was out of surgery or if Bodhi was awake was no good.

Jyn found herself back outside the medbay, watching through the glass pane as Bodhi was checked on by a Chiss doctor and a droid. The doctor spotted her and after giving the droid a few curt directions, walked towards her, checking the datapad in her hand as she went through the doors.

“Sergeant Erso, is anything the matter?” the woman’s eyes surveyed her as she spoke.

“N-no, not with me,” she mumbled, feeling more than a little pathetic.

“You must be worried about your friends.”

Friends. Jyn had never been one for friends, but now she supposed she had them, even though that didn’t seem to convey the entirety of her feelings for both men inside.

“Yes, could I see them? When appropriate?”

The doctor sighed, slipped the datapad in the pocket of her coat, and put a hand on Jyn’s shoulder.

“Mr. Rook and Captain Andor are both in critical condition. They are expected to recover, but it will take a long while. We have some strict rules regarding visitors, Sergeant.”

It was out of Jyn’s mouth before she even thought about it.

“You don’t understand. Cassian – he’s my husband.”

The doctor frowned and picked up her datapad once more. She moved her fingers on the screen, while Jyn waited patiently. It wasn’t like she had elsewhere to be.

“I’m sorry, Sergeant, but neither you nor Captain Andor is listed as being married on Alliance records.”

Jyn shook her head, “of course not. We were away for three years – it was a mission.”

“You have to update your records, then, with the appropriate documentation. And either way, visiting hours for someone in his condition are very strict.”

She started breathing hard and it took all of her training to suppress the urge to rage at the woman. She wanted to scream that there were things that files on Alliance records would, could never explain. The mess of her current feelings was one of them, because the file that proved that she and Cassian had been married was a fake and not even in their names to begin with: it was the marriage certificate of one Joreth Sward to a woman called Kestrel Dawn. Furthermore, her brain must be in tatters: she had never even thought of them as actually married. And then there was Bodhi, the only link she had left to her father. She didn’t even know how to begin to explain that.

The doctor kept watching her closely as she kept trying to school her features.

“Sergeant Erso?”

“Yes, alright.”

“I’ll make sure you are apprised of your friends’ status should anything change.”

“Thank you,” she mumbled.

The woman patted her arm and walked back into the medbay.

She was standing there looking at nothing in particular, lost in the vacuum of what she had just been told, when someone touched her shoulder. It was the blue-haired nurse.

“Sergeant?” she asked, with a small smile, “I know you’re worried about your friends and I know we have tight rules, but what I imagine you have been through together was bound to leave you lot feeling closer to each other than you were before… Right?”

Jyn nodded numbly, not quite finding the words to agree with the girl.

“I can get you in tonight to see them, if you want.”

“Thank you,” Jyn breathed and hobbled away from the nurse before she started to cry.

*

Alerona was good on her word. As comforting as Cassian’s bed was, Jyn’s head couldn’t find any measure of peace. She had spent the rest of the day wandering the base like a ghost until she found herself at the droid maintenance warehouse, scrambling for parts she could piece together in an attempt to distract herself. The kyber around her neck burned, as did her eyes when she felt it and was reminded of Chirrut’s comforting serenity.

She didn’t find the peace of mind she needed to meditate, though, and that left her feeling worse.

By the time dusk had arrived, the tips of her fingers were feeling raw from her tinkering with metal bits, and her stomach growled despite her not having any desire to eat. She dropped by the mess hall to grab a nutrient bar and some sort of juice, before heading back to Cassian’s room and trying to sleep. But rest eluded her, as she had felt it would.

So she got on her feet – well, foot, really –, put on her boot and Alliance jacket over her sleepclothes and hobbled along to the medbay, where she found Alerona reading a datapad while munching on something that looked as tasteless as her own dinner had been.

“Hi,” she said in a low voice.

The girl just smiled ruefully at her, checked their surroundings, and led Jyn inside the medbay.

“Where’s Bodhi?” Jyn asked, upon seeing the empty bed.

“Bacta. He should be back in a while.”

Her eyes scanned the small ward once more and there he was, not buried under a pile of sheets, so it looked slightly unnatural to her, this lying back with his arms studiously over the muted gray blanket under from which his immobilized leg was raised, traversed by all sorts of pins. Jyn winced, remembering how that leg had looked from up on the tower before she continued climbing against her every instinct.

He had climbed back for her. Stood on that horridly broken leg – three places, she noticed – and shot Krennic right before her eyes, saving her, and ultimately the transmission of the plans.

_How?_

She looked around for the nurse and saw that Alerona had vanished. So she walked up to Cassian, picked up the hand that wasn’t hooked to the console next to the bed with all sorts of probes and needles, and rubbed his fingers in hers. He looked peaceful – just the sort of sleep she felt deprived of -, even if he had an oxygen cannula attached to his nose; she let go of his hand, afraid she would disturb him.

“He’s taking well to the prosthetics in his back,” said Alerona softly, “he’s come out of anesthesia, but he wanted to turn on his side and take his cannula off, so we kept him awake just so the doctor could talk to him.”

Jyn nodded, feeling fondness snag at her chest at the thought of him being predictably difficult.

“He’s bound to wake up again sometime tonight,” the nurse continued, “but the system’s set up to warn us.”

She turned to look at the young woman and saw that she had a folded cot in one hand and was holding a pillow and what looked to be a blanket and a set of sheets under her other arm. Jyn gave her a quizzical look.

“Dr. Vitaan is away in her quarters and the droids shouldn’t be a bother,” she said, handing Jyn the bedclothes and setting up the cot on the floor next to Cassian’s bed, “you can sleep here. You look like you won’t be able to anywhere else.”

Jyn hugged the bundled covers and pillow to her chest, “thank you. I don’t know how-“

“He asked Dr. Vitaan about his wife. He was as high as a rocket, so we thought it was nonsense, but then you said you two were married this afternoon.”

Jyn felt her cheeks almost go into combustion, “it was a mission. We’re not really married, but-“

“You care about each other. It won’t get in the way of my job. Sleep here tonight, Sergeant Erso. You’ve been through a lot. Remember to keep that ankle elevated, though. And take your pain pills. They should help you sleep… Don’t deny yourself care.”

That last sentence felt a little too on the nose.

After Alerona left, Jyn settled on the cot next to Cassian, took her medicine, and lulled by the sound of the machines taking care of him, finally fell asleep.

 

*

She didn’t get caught. At the earliest sign of the sun, she scampered away from the medbay, with a quick squeeze to Cassian’s hand and after she managed to get an update on Bodhi, who had been brought back from treatment after Jyn had already fallen asleep. The pilot was making progress; as soon as he recovered from his surgery, he would be fitted for a prosthetic arm. She felt somehow lighter despite the churn in her gut she felt with the knowledge that it would be useless her knocking on Draven’s door to ask if there was any news of the plans.

So she went back to Cassian’s quarters and considered going back to sleep, since she still felt groggy from the pain meds. Instead, though, she was faced with the datatape of what she presumed was K-2’s backup and started ruminating an idea. She spent the day again feverishly trying to distract herself with droid parts until her eyes burned and her fingers bled. 

Right after lunch hour, Alerona gave her the news that Cassian had woken up feeling a bit poorly, but that he had been taken off the oxygen and was scheduled for another bacta treatment that afternoon. She felt comforted by the fact that she had an ally in the medbay who didn’t seem to exactly understand their relationship, but who recognized its importance.

Jyn considered that this summed up the way she felt about her and Cassian herself, in the end. Her feelings were something she didn’t quite understand, but that were undeniably _there._  

So that night, she snuck back in, this time making herself even more comfortable before lying down on the cot. She even took a page from Cassian’s own book and burrowed herself under the covers before fully swallowing her pain meds and closing her eyes.

Something, though, right before dawn, made her jump from her sedated sleep. It was the sound of a voice she hadn’t heard since sitting down on the beach on Scarif and feeling the ground quaking under her legs:

“Jyn.”


	21. The horror

When Cassian woke up again, Jyn was gone, and for a moment he thought that he had dreamed her presence near his bed; the cot and the tangled sheets and blankets were nowhere to be found and the med droids were humming nearby as if nothing had happened. He must have failed at hiding his confusion because for the first time since he had woken up, he heard Bodhi’s voice from across the med ward. 

“She’s been slipping out in the morning.”

Cassian turned to look at the young man two beds across from him, whose face must mirror his own, mottled with bruises and small cuts, with sunken eyes and cracked lips.

“What do you mean ‘has been’?” he found himself asking through the remains of sleepiness.

Bodhi huffed a laugh, “second night in a row she slept there.”

He didn’t want to think too much about what that information meant, but he sheltered it close to his heart.

“How are you doing?” he asked Bodhi, because while the pilot looked terrible, his injuries didn’t seem as scattered as his own.

“Other than ghost pain in my arm, I’m doing better. I am almost… myself again, after the- after what went on in Jedha.”

The Bor Gullet – as Jyn said the things was called –, Jedha’s destruction, Cassian figured he could mean either one of them, which only placed another load at the extraordinary feat the man before him had pulled off. Cassian realized then that he didn’t know exactly how it was that Bodhi had managed to get the message to the fleet about the shield. So he posed that question, carefully, from one soldier to another, and not as a superior. Bodhi swallowed hard.

“It took a lot more people than just me. We needed to get us hooked to the comms – at- at one point the farking cable was too short, will you believe it – but also there was a master switch we needed to find to get us through. In the end, it was Chirrut that- that turned it on, that crazy bastard. Tonc said he just walked into the crossfire. That was how- that was how he died.”

Cassian swallowed hard, tried to keep his hands from shaking as best as he could.

“And- and Baze?”

“I- I didn’t see Baze again after that. As soon as I got the message out, a trooper tossed a grenade inside the shuttle. From then on, it was- Tonc helped me.”

Bodhi glanced down at his missing arm.

“You picked the grenade up,” said Cassian, flatly.

“I was always pretty good at smashball,” Bodhi said with a shy shrug.

Cassian settled back against the pillows, staring at the ceiling for a while, even from the elevated angle his bed was in. He was feeling better that morning; there wasn’t a lot of pain, especially when he breathed, and he didn’t feel as nauseous, though he suspected they had him medicated for that. A small voice in the back of his head told him that Jyn being there had probably done him more good than he thought, but he chose to dismiss it. Bodhi was still speaking, though, and he managed to turn his head to face him without putting his torso through the trouble of holding itself up again.

“I tried. I tried looking for them – for anyone that might still be alive. But then the shuttle’s radar started going insane with the Death Star approaching and we did one last canvas of the beach. We found you there.”

Cassian nodded, grabbing at wisps of memories of Jyn shooting up on her knees like she had been struck by lightening, her trying to grab him, yelling for help. He had been barely conscious then, because she had accidently knocked on his side and sent his entire body spiraling in pain. He didn’t remember much afterwards, only her voice, telling him not to talk, except he didn’t remember being able to.

“You know, Captain-“

“Cassian, please, Bodhi.”

“Cassian… You looked at me just then like I was insane for tossing that grenade back there, but-“ and here Bodhi looked down, hesitated.

“But?”

“Anytime you want to talk about what you and Jyn went through,” the young man sounded almost apologetic, “I know it’s hard sometimes, but- I’m here is what I’m saying. You know, to talk. Without it being a debrief.”

Cassian blinked. He felt slightly angry at first, though he made sure he didn’t show it, because he felt like Rook had just presumed a lot of things about him that were true, and that made him feel like someone had just yanked away his sheets and left him in his kriffing hospital gown. People – other than Draven and, he would have to admit, Jyn – didn’t read him. _He_ read people. And this was the second time since he and Jyn had left Coruscant for Jedha that someone hit too close to home on how he normally handled things. First it was Chirrut in that cell back in NiJedha, with that insufferable smile, which knowing he wouldn’t see again formed a strange knot in his chest. Now it was Bodhi, with this preposterous offer to _talk_ about things, as if he would to Dr. Tarwin or to something like a friend.

Spies didn’t have friends. He wasn’t sure he particularly deserved them.

He felt a tug in his chest that screamed _Jyn_ , though.

He nodded, because Bodhi was looking like he wanted the ground to swallow him and because Cassian had some measure of regard for the poor man, even if he didn’t know how to deal with it.

They were saved by a male Twi’lek in a nurse uniform who walked in to check on both of them, but addressed Cassian especially, telling him that an Alliance agent had just arrived with a shipment of Bonemer and that they were going to extract the pins from his legs that afternoon, after he had been treated with the cerum and with yet another bacta immersion. He was relieved. It meant that there was a chance he might be of some help, after the wreckage their mission to Scarif had wrought on the Rebellion.

Cassian also asked for some food, which was taken as a sign of improvement by the medical personnel. He wasn’t sure he remembered the last time he had eaten anything that hadn’t been fed to him directly into his veins.

By the time he was taken in a hover chair for treatment on his leg, he felt almost alive again.

 

*

 

The feeling didn’t last long. He fell asleep on the surgical slab they had him settled, lulled by the smells of alcohol and bacta spray. Cassian dreamed he was on fire this time, something bright and furious encompassing him as he lay there prone with his leg broken to bits and his lungs being poked by something inside him. Jyn was in his arms, but as the horizon became something stark and white – _there is no horizon_ , he heard a voice say –, he saw contrasted to it a deep red stain on his shirt, blood that wasn’t coming out of him, but from Jyn. She was so white, so pale, that she began to disappear into the blinding light around them, until he felt there was nothing in arms and he woke with a scream locked in his throat, and the Twi’lek nurse saying to him in a quiet voice that he was in Base One, on Yavin IV, alive and recovering.

Cassian found himself dressed in the same soft sleep clothes he had been wearing since his meeting with Mothma and Draven, hair still wet, which was a comfort when in his dream he had been burning. He blinked until his eyes adjusted to the harsh lighting of the medbay ward and then looked at his leg, no longer adorned with the surgical pins, but still immobilized in a splint.

“When can I be discharged?” he asked.

The Twi’lek, who had at his point introduced himself as the head voluntary nurse, laughed.

“They weren’t kidding when they said you weren’t very… patient.”

Cassian fixed him with a glare.

“I know there is a lot going on, Captain Andor, but you have to take it easy if you really want to be useful to the Alliance in the future,” he finished arranging whatever it was that Cassian had hooked to his arm, “if it makes you feel any better, Dr. Vitaan said we could allow you visitors, since your breathing is better.”

He nodded, glad that Jyn wouldn’t have to be sneaking around any longer; he had a hunch that her nightly visits had been for her benefit as well as his.

However, she didn’t come any point of the rest of the afternoon, and he had to talk himself out of any alarm he might feel in her absence. The fact that she was still angry with him about the Council meeting before they landed on Scarif was something that came to him, now that he thought about it. Perhaps she had heard that he had improved and was done feeling pity for him after the sorry state he was left in; perhaps she had also been treated with Bonemer for her ankle and been sent on another mission.

Perhaps she had finally done the right thing and gone after the plans herself.

Neither Draven nor Mothma deigned to show up again, not even to tell them if his lead about Tatooine had given any results.

Never, in all his time in the Alliance, he had felt so clueless and cut off from the action. He felt seven again, trailing after the older boys in the Fest rebel cell that had picked him off the streets after his mother had died, having to guess by himself what it was that their commanders were planning.

It was not a good feeling. Bodhi seemed used to it, happy to stay in bed with a datapad although every now and then with an otherwise confused and mournful look in his eyes, but that was what rank and file did to you; it made one accustomed to not being privy to everything that was going on.

Cassian, however, had been in a slightly different position in the last years.

He watched as through the open blinds of the medbay clouds moved over the base from the south and that part of the moon’s typical evening showers began, with a clap of thunder that was comfortingly familiar to him, though it did little to fill the void he had been feeling inside him since he had woken up. As the brief rain shower ended and the setting sun peeked through the moving gray clouds, a droid brought him a tasteless but still light dinner. Bodhi hadn’t spoken to him since that morning, between him sleeping and the pilot being off on his treatment sessions, and now they ate in the sort of comfortable silence he wasn’t used to enjoying with anyone other than Jyn and before that, K-2SO.

Cassian was almost dosing off after his empty plate was taken away, when the door to their ward hissed open and he jumped, his heart filling with an expectation that he tried in vain to drown under good sense. Whatever that feeling was, it was frustrated, because instead of the quiet intensity and the tan fatigues of the woman he wanted to see, it was the white robes and overwhelming serenity of another.

Mon Mothma seemed uncertain. Her liquid eyes were carefully trained on his face. He knew she had been through some sort of training to do the work she did behind the scenes in the Senate and he could never have described her as vulnerable, but there was something definitely _raw_ about the way she was looking at him now.

“Senador?” he asked, because she didn’t look like she was going to speak without prompting.

She turned to look at Bodhi, who in turn was watching them cautiously, the sort of man who was used to being invisible, although not in the sense that Cassian was. Mothma clenched her jaw, seemed to decide something.

“There is something I should have told you the last time we spoke, Captain Andor.”

He only nodded in response.

“The Senate has been dissolved.”

He couldn’t say he was surprised, because the Empire had really blown to pieces any sort of limits of what they could expect of them by building a space station like the Death Star. But that information gave him the confirmation he really hadn’t needed.

“They have the Princess,” he said, not asking a question.

“Yes.”

He bit down on his lower lip, his head churning.

“Her cover, her father’s cover-“

“Yes, that is the most obvious conclusion.”

He nodded, several pieces of the puzzle he was constantly playing in his head sliding out of place and going into a different position. But that news was obviously not the only reason Mothma was standing there talking to him.

“I have terrible news,” and her voice was so small, he was slightly surprised she seemed to know he would be affected by the fact that Princess Leia had been executed.

Cassian closed his eyes and swallowed, remembering that young girl who looked physically nothing like her parents, who was evidently adopted, but who was being raised to take over for them one day, and despite not being the biological daughter of politicians, standing before people and exuding power was something that came naturally to her. Leia was small, smaller than even Jyn, and both women, he thought fondly, made you forget their size, because both imposed their presence wherever they were in drastically different, yet very effective ways. Despite her risking herself by wheeling and dealing information for the Rebellion in the Senate, he had never thought she was really at risk. People like him were always there with people like her, to take the fall for them, to ensure the future they built would have people like her father and her to lead the way.

“Has Senator Organa been informed?” he asked around the knot he found he had in his throat.

Mothma’s eyes widened, “Force, no, that’s not what I mean.”

He shook his head as if to clear it.

“Captain Andor, the Death Star has been used once more. Alderaan has been destroyed.”

Bodhi let out a choked noise and Cassian felt his legs – including his broken one - go numb. His face must have turned a particularly interesting color, because Mothma was suddenly at his elbow, asking if he needed anything. His hands were shaking, not unlike every farking night he had killed someone to protect the Alliance and the woman fussing over him, and the only thing he found himself capable of doing was shaking his head in a negative reply. He managed to wave a hand and count his breaths, while Mothma pulled a bench he hadn’t seen close to his bed and sat down.

“Senator Organa-“

“They were there, the queen and him. And frankly, I think they wouldn’t want it any other way. I know I wouldn’t.”

He lowered his head, “of course.”

Cassian wished _he_ had been there as well. It was not fair that he got to escape that thing twice after everything he had done and good innocent people should be once more killed in his stead.

He turned his face away from Mon Mothma – at this point he doubted she would care he was being disrespectful – and she interpreted it as a sign that he wanted to be left alone. Every one of her gestures since coming to see him implied she knew the relationship he had with the Organas, knew he had spent some years of his youth serving the Alliance on Alderaan as an agent. She got up silently – as she was wont do – and seemed to be spirited away.

After she was gone, he turned to check on Bodhi, and found the pilot looking transfixed to the blanket that was over his lap, at the space where his forearm should be, muttering something in Jedhan he picked up as being about their being too late. He couldn’t find enough strength to rebut the young man’s assessment, so he instead turned to the window next to him and focused on the condensed transparisteel pane next to him, through which he could make out the outlines of trees.

He wondered if they had told Jyn.

And then, as if that thought had acted like a summons, she tore through the medbay, although to any casual observer she would have seemed merely in a bit of a hurry. He knew better, from the weight of her step, even as she hobbled on those crutches, and from how even her lips were turned as white as death, just like in his dream.

She stood there, in the middle of the ward, looking from him to Bodhi, with words wanting to escape from between her teeth.

“Come here,” he said, to put her out of her misery.

She limped forward, with her forehead creased, and he wanted to run his hand on it and smooth it, because she looked like she was kicking herself as much as he was, and sometimes it hurt, how they were sometimes too much alike in everything that caused them pain.

Jyn sat on the same stool Mon Mothma had left by his bed, picked up his hand like it was something precious, and stayed looking at it with her eyes so watery he felt something choking him all over again.

“Bodhi and Baze-,” she muttered, “Bodhi and Baze were right after Jedha. This was all for nothing. We were too late.”

He turned his palm in her hand, laced his fingers through hers, and blew air out of his nose.

“Perhaps,” he said, “but we’re still here and we have to keep fighting.”

She inhaled sharply, “Cassian, look at you. Look at Bodhi. Look at me.”

“I know I can’t do much right now, but Jyn-“

“I know,” she said, through gritted teeth, “I know.”

She stayed in silence for a moment, during which he felt the atmosphere shift in the base to something heavy. The generals on base must have briefed the soldiers, pilots and ground personnel about what had happened, and he could hear people actually screaming at a distance. He swallowed hard. If Jedha had made so many of them toss themselves into a suicide mission like the one they led to Scarif, he could only imagine what something like the destruction of an entire planet might do. And it wasn’t just any planet. It was Alderaan.

Alderaan hadn’t always been peaceful and because of that, he, though Festian, spoke Alderaanian, even if with a particular accent and trespassed by several words that survived from their original language and a bunch of other ones whose origins he had no idea about. Until going to Alderaan itself, he saw it mostly as another planet on the Galaxy charts he remembered from school and as a particularly villainous occupier in the history books he remembered his parents having at home, which went against the narrative of a conciliating emancipation when Alderaan gave up its military and navy arsenals.

Present Alderaanian politics, though, had mollified some of that impression, especially when he came to close proximity of its current reigning dynasty. Cassian had always been adaptable, after all: his parents had been Separatists; he technically was part of a political movement to restore the government they had fought against and that eventually turned into the Empire. Allying himself for a second time – at six and then at sixteen - with people his father had always scoffed at hadn’t been anything new.

He felt Jyn tug at as his hand and look at him with large and sad grayish eyes. She put out a hand, like the previous night, and tremulously ran her fingers through his hair, skimmed them lightly on his cheek. Her other hand let go of his and found itself on his splinted leg.

“They got those pins out,” she said, seemingly for lack of anything else to utter.

He nodded and then heard a sound from Bodhi’s corner of the ward. The pilot had got out of bed and was dragging his IV pole in their direction. Jyn got up from the stool to let him have it, and settled gingerly next to Cassian’s good leg after ruffling the pilot’s hair.

The three of them just sat there in silence, listening to the devastating effects the news was having on the base. It eased a bit of his self-loathing and made him want to get off that bed. He felt like the child he was again for the second time that day, but now for very different reasons.

He was hurt. He was angry. But he was surrounded by good people – and next to one particular good woman, he had to admit - that felt as hurt and as angry as him. He was home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once again, I'm shamelessly borrowing Elizabeth (anghraine)'s headcanon for Alderaan and planets/systems like Yavin and Fest. It speaks to me on so many levels and it's somehow translated here into Cassian's feelings for that planet.


	22. Sorrow

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was the chapter I struggled with the most, so far. I'm coming close to the end of the semester, so that could explain why this is becoming difficult, but mostly I struggled with all the **feelings** in the chapter. I switched the order of things around so much, I'm sure there's still stuff left that will seem weirdly out of place. 
> 
> Anyway, thanks to those who have been reading this.

Jyn woke up with a start, having heard a knock on the door, and checking the chrono, saw that it was mid afternoon. She waited for the knock again, in the case she had imagined it, and then there it was, louder this time. She scrambled from under Cassian’s covers, and seeing that she was still wearing the same clothes as the night before, opened the door just a smidge to peer outside.

It was Bodhi. He was standing there with two hands, one of which was carrying a container of food; the other – with impeccable synthskin peeking out from the overlarge sleeve of an Alliance jacket – was still raised as if to knock on the door again. He still had dark circles under his eyes and his face looked a bit pinched, but he was the one to look her over and frown.

“You look like hell.”

She supposed her hair was looking like a rat’s nest and that the usual lines of kohl she now kept firmly around her eyes were all over her eyelids. Her clothes were rumpled and she wouldn’t be surprised if she stank. Bodhi raised his eyebrows at her and she sheepishly let him through the door.

“Cassian doesn’t know I’m sleeping here,” she mumbled.

“He also didn’t know you slept on a cot next to his bed for the past two nights,” Bodhi quipped.

She didn’t even bother acting surprised that he knew of her movements. Apparently, he hadn’t been as doped up on meds as she thought he had. He placed the food on the table next to the door to the ‘fresher.

“Are you hungry?”

She pressed her lips together, “not really, but I think I need to eat.”

“Go shower,” he said, wrinkling his nose, “you’ll feel better.”

She reached out and took his new hand. Only someone who had known the previous one would be able to tell the difference and she wasn’t one of those people. Something heavy-laden set in her stomach at the thought that with NiJedha gone, perhaps there was no one alive that would. She felt a whimper escape her throat as she was reminded of the events of the past night yet again.

When Draven had her sit down again in a briefing room earlier the day before, she hadn’t known quite what to expect. Alerona had said in the morning that some Alliance-collaborating smugglers had brought a shipment of Bonemer the previous night; Cassian and Bodhi would be priorities for treatment, but maybe they could spare some for her ankle. She had been almost certain Draven was going to ship her off on some mission, and having made her peace with leaving Cassian and Bodhi behind, she had hoped that at least it would have something to do with the missing Death Star plans.

But no, his purpose for that meeting hadn’t been that. He just abruptly informed her that her father’s weapon had been used; not to destroy a city or a portion of a planet, like it had on Jedha and then Scarif, but to finally demonstrate its full powers. And it had felt like a slap in the face that it was Alderaan. It was almost as if they knew that it would render her almost powerless with guilt, not only because of Bail Organa, but also because she knew that Cassian had ties to the planet. The late Joreth Sward had fortuitously been Alderaanian, yes, but his identity fit Cassian like a glove because apparently he had spent enough time there to treat it as a second home.

So Jyn felt its destruction on some sort of personal level that she couldn’t very well explain without delving into her complicated relationship with the man she had spent three years pretending she was married to.

She had sprinted from the briefing room as soon as she had felt Draven was done, and hobbled determinedly to the medbay. She found Cassian and Bodhi there, both appearing shell-shocked, though Cassian hid it better. He seemed to recognize her state of mind, even as she attempted to mask it.

“Come here,” he had said. 

He was trying to hide his feelings as well, but self-loathing radiated off him and she was sure he knew she felt the same. She had sat down and picked up one of his hands, the one that wasn’t laden with IVs and sensors, and just clung to it because her heart was shattering in one long scream all over again. They talked briefly, mostly him comforting her, something that left her feeling guilty and useless, so she had touched him. She touched his face, still a little bruised and too pale, its angles even more sharpened after three days in the medbay, and noticed that his leg didn’t have any pins any more, which was a relief, but nothing that came close to alleviating the knot that burned in her chest.

This was not fair.

Bodhi then had come and sat with them in silence, and she settled next to Cassian’s good leg, tried to feel some measure of comfort in their company as they heard the wails, the crying, the general feeling of impending mourning settle over the base.

It was how she had ended up curled around Cassian on his medbay bed, careful not to knock on where his flesh was still tender, when Bodhi had dragged himself back to bed. After the pilot had fallen into a fitful sleep, Cassian had pulled her towards him despite a tiny squeak escaping her mouth, and so she settled next to him against the pillows. Their fingers were still laced together and she could feel after a while that her cheek was moistening his shirt. And as she had started feeling somewhat at peace, she could feel the turmoil under his skin, how his muscles grew tense underneath her touch, how his jaw was clenched.

When she had arrived at the medbay, he had been the one to pull her from the precipice they seemed to be both standing over. It was apparently her turn now.

So she had decided to do something she hadn’t done since they had survived on that beach.

She tugged on his hand and as he turned to look at her, she kissed him on the mouth. It was something small and chaste, just to tell him that she was there and hadn’t forgotten, and she felt him inhale against her. So she put a hand on his chest and he let the air go through his nose, chased her lips back and opened up to her so beautifully, she felt something running out of the corner of her eye. It was their kitchen on Coruscant and the Corellian freighter on the way to Eadu all over again. She pulled back and rested her forehead against his, nuzzled him a bit, at which he let out a strangled sound.

“Jyn.”

“Shh,” she whispered, and kissed him again, cautiously, as if he would break.

“It feels wrong,” he whispered back, but kept his lips against hers even as he said it.

She lowered her head, feeling like she was shattering in teeny tiny pieces as she nodded, and he pressed his mouth to her forehead instead.

“Don’t,” he muttered, “I’m not-“

She looked up at him, but he looked speechless and filled with pain. She wondered if she looked the same. So she burrowed against his side and pressed her nose against the hollow of his neck, inhaling bacta and disinfectant and skin, just smooth clean skin, and closed her eyes. He was still talking, in a whisper. His accent was heavier, like it usually got when he was tired – physically or emotionally.

“I feel guilty even about feeling guilty. It’s like I’m feeling sorry for myself for no reason.”

“You have nothing to feel guilty about,” she whispered back, turning her mouth from his shoulder towards his ear, “I, on the other hand-“

“Surviving that thing seems like reason enough.”

Was her heart ever going to stop breaking?

“Then we’re guilty of the same sin.”

He huffed and opened his mouth to speak, but seemed to know better and closed it again, biting his lower lip.

She was getting angry and he could feel it. The crystal underneath her soft Alliance shirt started burning against her skin and she fidgeted with it. _Chirrut_ , she thought, _Chirrut would be smacking us both over the head for this._

She figured she could try another approach. What an insufferable man.

“Cassian?”

He looked at her with reddened eyes that surprised her, because she hadn’t seen he was crying. His cheeks were dry.

“Yeah.”

“Shut up.”

“Fair enough,” he hummed, squeezing her against him even if he still sounded sad as kriff.

Then the glass door to their ward had opened with a hiss, breaking whatever it was that had settled between them, and Jyn had almost leapt from her place next to Cassian, except he had found strength enough to still her with the one arm he had around her, and as the Chiss doctor took them in, she looked something between forlorn and indignant, but Jyn could bet all the credits the Alliance owed her that Cassian’s face – and hers as well, if she was honest – had been enough to make even the most straight-laced of doctors to forgo arguing with them that night.

So Dr. Vitaan had merely checked on his vitals, looked over to see if Jyn was putting any strain where she shouldn’t, and hadn’t even bid them good night, because that would have been in poor taste.

“My condolences, Captain, Sergeant. The news must not have been an easy one for you to hear.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” she replied through the knot in her throat, “we’re sorry, too.”

When the doctor was gone, Jyn settled against the pillows, curled around Cassian, and closed her eyes to try and stop the humming in the back of her head that had been going on since Draven had told her the news. She peered at Cassian and he had his eyes closed as well. She knew it would be hard for them to sleep, but there was nothing either of them could do.

It had been a restless night and the only time Jyn felt truly defeated by exhaustion was when daylight was already peaking through the blinds of the ward’s window. Cassian had been waking up and falling asleep in turns next to her as well, but whenever they were both awake at the same time, they hadn’t acknowledged it. It was eerily similar to the first nights they had spent together and yet radically different at the same time.

She had a world of words hanging on her tongue but hadn’t dared uttering them. Whatever it was that was happening between them, she now felt like it would shatter at any point, just like they were told Alderaan had been. And Jyn wasn’t usually good with words and feelings. She was good at being other women who said nice things to people she only marginally cared about. Dealing with her own head and her own heart was something foreign which she had never had much practice to begin with. Cassian had always been the one with the words – he had been a recruiter way longer than she had, as far she knew – and the one with the lingering touches; the one who had started this _thing_ between them, and now she regretted not cutting it short when she should have, because she now felt like he was pulling away from her and it hurt like hell.

So instead of falling asleep when she had felt it pulling at her, she blinked wide awake, checked to see if Cassian was indeed passed out next to her, and slipped from his embrace. Her feet took her away from the medbay, into the still darkened corridors of the base, and she found her way not to the bunk she had been ignoring since she got back from Scarif with half a heart and an ankle in a splint, but to Cassian’s quarters, where she felt it was easier to be than in the man’s presence.

For that thought alone, she was pretty sure she was going insane.

Jyn buried herself under the covers, seeking to smell him but failing to do so, and had finally succumbed to sleep.

That was how she had ended up with her hair plastered to the side of her head, unwilling to deal with the fact that she had been the one to kiss him this time – _really_ kiss him – and his reaction had been self-denial. Which was predictable, if she was honest with herself.

It all made her feel unbelievably stupid.

She looked up at Bodhi and saw that he had a bemused smile on his face.

“It looks disturbingly real, doesn’t it?”

She let go of his new hand and wiped at her nose with her sleeve. She nodded.

“Go take that shower,” he said again, “I got you mostly cold cuts, fruit and bread. They won’t go cold.”

*

She felt marginally better as she ate under Bodhi’s gaze later, his huge sad eyes nonetheless amused with how fast she was munching on the blue cheese and the citrus fruit he had smuggled from the mess hall for her. The sleeves of the clean blue shirt she found on the pack she was given by the quartermaster didn’t quite hang on to her wrists and kept sliding down her forearms, which was annoying but at the same time comfortable in some measure. She let her hair dry by itself after her shower, leaving it wet enough to drench the shirt on the back of her neck.

She and Bodhi didn’t talk, much in the same way they hadn’t the night before, when he had found his way next to her and Cassian after Mothma had broken them the news. She found herself rupturing that silence, though.

“Thank you,” she said, holding his gaze for more time than she was usually comfortable with.

He shook his head, “I owed you, Jyn. After Jedha.”

“I felt responsible,” she ran a hand to wipe fruit juice from her chin, “after what Saw did, after what my father-“

“Your father was a good man and he made me believe I could be one, too,” she felt something tighten in her chest, “and I was really lucky to have found _you_ in Imperial Center. Really, really lucky, Jyn. You made me feel like I could do this.”

She swallowed, sniffed a bit. Bodhi wasn’t done, though.

“When- when I finally plugged us in the comm tower on Scarif, I thought of your father. I was finally relaying his message.”

She nodded, because she understood. She had been thinking of her father – her mother, too - the whole time, even as she thought she was going to die clinging to Cassian on the beach. The kyber on her chest felt warm and she got up, clumsily throwing her arms around the cargo pilot. He seemed to not quite know what to do and it took him a couple of seconds for him to hug her back.

“I’m glad you survived, Bodhi. If you hadn’t, I wouldn’t have anything left of him and I’ve lived far too long like that.”

Perhaps she was getting better at that whole feelings thing, after all.

Her comlink chirped and she stepped away from Bodhi, avoiding his gaze as much as she could, because she had her limits.

It was the medbay, saying that if she wanted a round of Bonemer treatment, she could have one that same afternoon. Bodhi nodded at her encouragingly, saying it had done wonders for him before he could be fitted with his prosthesis.

So she hopped back to the medbay a little before dusk, and she fervently wished it would be one of the last times she was on those farking crutches, because she was tired of not being able to walk by herself. Skawn’vrey, the head voluntary nurse, met her at the door to the medbay and quickly led her to one of the treatment rooms. She wasn’t really able to see if Cassian was still in his bed.

Her clothes were taken off with the help of female nurses she hadn’t met – a fresh-faced human and a young Bothan –, and she was left alone in a hospital gown, with her ankle finally free of its cast. Her foot looked deathly white, her toenails a stark pink against what looked like thinner skin, the hairs around her ankle looking weirdly thicker than the ones on the rest of her leg. 

The treatment was simple and if she hadn’t spent most of the day sleeping, she would have dozed off during it. As it was, she kept her eyes closed, but her ears alert for any sort of news that might interest her, even if she denied it to herself. By the time they were done with her, she was given back her crutches and told to avoid putting weight on her foot, but that she would be fine without a cast.

It was past dinnertime, so the medbay was empty save for a few med droids doing a few mindless chores, and she couldn’t resist walking through the intensive care ward. She supposed she could try and talk to Cassian again about what had happened the night before, when she had been so careless and stupid.

But Cassian’s bed was empty. She felt something cold run through her spine and her heart stuttered in her chest; she held herself together by thinking that he was probably having yet another bacta treatment. Perhaps they thought that way he could be healed quicker. 

Something on the bed across from Cassian’s, however, caught her attention.

The patient looked like a young human girl, but the lines around her eyes even as she slept told Jyn another story, one that she found remarkably familiar. Her hair was in a messy braid almost down to her waist, its curled ends lying prone against the soft bedding Jyn knew so well. Her cheeks were devoid of any color, but she had no visible bandages, only an IV drip of what looked like saline solution to mend the dehydration that Jyn had easily noticed. Something about her set off all sorts of alarms in Jyn’s head, the same ones she heard whenever she was before someone she had previously met.

As if the woman could hear her thoughts, her eyelids fluttered open and a pair of rich brown irises looked right through her. Jyn was about to bolt away – even as her movements were still limited – when the woman ran her tongue over her chapped lips.

“Lianna?”

Jyn found herself hurtled back to an afternoon on this same planet when she was barely twelve years old, standing behind Saw as he ranted and raved before the Alliance Council, his diatribes aimed specially at the Alderaanian man across from him. Behind the politician she later learned was called Bail Organa was a girl a little younger than she was, whose white robes and pampered ceremonial hair-do contrasted with young Lianna Hallick’s ratty braids and rough linen clothes. As both men got ready to leave later that day after another unproductive meeting, both girls had silently shared some star fruit, and though they hadn’t talked much, Jyn felt a mixture of kinship and resentment at someone who had everything she had lost, but who at the same time was being introduced to a sort of fight they knew – even that young – they were unlikely to come out victorious of.

Jyn found her face had collapsed in a frown, but felt her features soften when she remembered that this was the person who had received their transmission from Scarif in the first place.

The Galaxy was, sometimes, ridiculously and tragically small. Or at least, the Rebellion was.

“Your highness,” she said, her throat thickening with a lump.

Princess Leia of Alderaan sat up with a small curse identical to one that Cassian let slip on occasion. She blinked her large eyes at Jyn and took in the crutches and her facial expression.

“You’re-“

“Jyn Erso, actually, your highness.”

“Don’t,” the young woman answered, and Jyn went cold with dread, but apparently the Princess’ objection was to something else, “Leia. Call me Leia, please. I’m as much Alliance Intelligence as you are.”

The words burst out of Jyn’s mouth as if she would die if she didn’t say them, “the plans-“

“I brought them with me. Thank you,” a tear ran down Leia’s cheek and she quickly wiped it with the hand she had the IV unit attached to.

Jyn approached the young woman’s bed gingerly, as if she were going to be consumed in flames should she come any closer. She felt didn’t have any other option, though: if they had survived, then they would continue to fight together. And Jyn didn’t see any other possibility in her future now other than avenging all that she had lost and witnessed others lose.

“I am so, so sorry. My father- I don’t even know how to-“

“Your parents were as much a victim of the Death Star as mine were, Jyn,” Leia clenched her teeth, “we’re going to destroy it, or die trying.”

Jyn nodded stiffly and set her teeth so she wouldn’t start crying like she had never cried in her entire short adult life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been meaning to have it revealed that Leia and Jyn know each other for a while now, based on that comic that was going around on tumblr. [skitzofreak](http://archiveofourown.org/users/skitzofreak/pseuds/skitzofreak) has also referenced it in the last chapter of "you give me something". If you haven't read that, do so right now.


	23. Hope

Cassian had spent most of the day stubbornly pretending he was fine with Jyn slipping away early that morning and trying to smother down the urge he had to get out of that bed – medical orders be damned – and find her to apologize. But he thought that he would only make matters worse and besides, he wasn’t sure he would just keel over on his face if he attempted it.

He pretended he didn't see Bodhi’s pointed looks until the pilot had thankfully been led away to fit his prosthetic arm, and deflected most of Alerona’s subtle’s questions with equally subtle answers; the young nurse seemed to ignore the fact that he was a spy and a practiced liar. The same mood that befell the medbay the night before seemed to prevail, with few nurses around and the same heavy silence.

That was, until the atmosphere suddenly shifted and he knew that it could only have been something that had happened _on base_ , to everyone’s immediate knowledge, because otherwise, Draven or Mothma would have come to him. At least he had hoped his reaction to Mothma’s telling him about Alderaan hadn’t totally curtailed his access to relevant intelligence.

His doubts were cleared when two junior officers bypassed the nurses and Dr. Vitaan with curt words and asked for a hover chair and a fresh uniform to be brought for him. He blinked, because so far High Command had been more accommodating of his injuries, but he supposed that with him doing much better, that sort of treatment was over.

It was the first time he saw the outside of the medbay since leaving the base for Scarif; it was almost blinding. His uniform felt comforting and yet something foreign on his skin after so much bacta and the feel of soft hospital linens. Plus, he felt like he was being paraded around in that hoverchair, which annoyed him, but his leg was still immobilized and he wasn’t entirely sure how his back would hold him upright.

Command was fluttering with activity; people were looking dead on their feet but a few had something at the edge of their eyes that made Cassian cautiously hopeful that there was good news at last; at least since Jyn had pushed that lever that had broadcast the plans from that Citadel tower. He was pushed through and left in a briefing room, where one of the officers escorting him - a young human fem with bright eyes and a tinge of nervousness – offered him water and some fruit. He accepted because the entire experience of being outside after so long, in what felt like some momentous occasion, was making him lightheaded.

He wondered what Jyn was up to, but the thought of her and the night before brought such a surge of guilt within him, he quickly shut down that line of thinking in order to focus on what he knew would soon be at hand.

The door swished open and Draven walked in, a pungent smell of bad caff following him and settling in the room. The man looked like he had been through every hyperspace lane in the Galaxy in less than forty-eight hours. He gestured with his hand and the paneling on the walls gave away to show the briefing rooms on either side of the one they were in. To the right sat – in what Cassian was sure was a hallucination on his part – Princess Leia Organa of Alderaan, her white robes charred with blaster fire, wisps of her hair escaping the twin buns on either side of her head. She looked well composed, if a little anxious and peaky. On the right, a young man in a farmer’s get-up he had never seen before sat staring wide-eyed and somewhat terrified at the walls around him.

Cassian kept his face as neutral as possible as he looked back at Draven.

“As you can see, the Princess made it back,” said the general, “she brought the plans you transmitted. They’re being analyzed as we speak.”

Cassian allowed himself to drop his head and close his eyes briefly in relief.

“The kid next door is one Luke Skywalker, from Tatooine,” Draven shot him a look for emphasis as he continued, “says he and his uncle bought two droids from Jawas two days ago. One of them, an R2 unit, took off from their home compound in the middle of the night to look for its alleged master, a man named Obi-Wan Kenobi.”

Cassian’s brows furrowed. He had never heard that name before. Still, it gave him some measure of comfort to know that he was right in the hunch he passed along to Mothma and Draven.

“Did our people find him?” It was too much to ask for, but he was finding this all a bit too much for his painkiller-addled brain.

“Not really,” the older man huffed, “not our people _per se_. Obi-Wan Kenobi was a general in the Clone Wars who fought alongside Senator Organa. Organa had initially sent the Princess to Tatooine in order to find him – the _alternative_ you said he was going to consult Senator Mothma about.”

Cassian nodded, “that’s why she was above Scarif.”

“Exactly. When the ship was boarded, she put the plans in the R2 unit and recorded a message for Kenobi. Then she ordered it into a escape pod that was dropped on Tatooine.”

“So this guy here found it fortuitously.”

“Pretty much,” sighed Draven.

 _As Chirrut would say, “all is as the Force wills it”_.

“Funny you should say that,” said Draven, and Cassian felt a flush rise on the back of his neck at having actually spoken out loud – he was definitely far from a full recovery, “Kenobi was a Jedi knight.”

“Was?”

Draven cleared his throat, “Skywalker and him tried to make their way to Alderaan, but it had just been destroyed. That was how they came upon the Princess: they were caught in the Death Star’s tractor beam. Kenobi died there after disabling it so they could escape.”

If Cassian hadn’t been working in Intelligence for most of his adult life, he could have sworn he was being fed the stuff of action holovids.

“They broke her out of the Death Star? She was on it when they shot at Alderaan?”

“They made her watch.”

Cassian flinched, “what is she doing next door?”

Draven grimaced and pushed the glass of water on the table towards Cassian, apparently seeing something he wasn’t feeling. He drank it, if only to accommodate his boss.

“She asked me to be here. I honestly couldn’t say no.”

He felt like he was missing several pieces of this story.

“How did they get here?”

“Same way they got into the Death Star in the first place,” Draven said drily, “a smuggler named Han Solo and his partner, a Wookie called Chewbacca. There isn’t much they can tell us in the way of intel other than the fact that they owe Jabba the Hutt a considerable amount of credits they intend to pay with – and I’m not kidding – the reward we owe them.”

Cassian rolled his eyes.

“We also owe them something else,” continued the general, “the Death Star is headed our way. They forgot to check their ship for bugs.”

A chill ran down Cassian’s spine. He remembered the ground shaking beneath him in Jedha, as he held on to Jyn while they watched her father’s message, thinking it was an earthquake; and he remembered feeling the same thing on Scarif and welcoming the thought of dying having fulfilled his last mission. Was there a way to survive this for the third time? He looked back at the kid in the next room; Skywalker was having a bowl of fruit and some blue milk, with his eyes darting anxiously to the door every few seconds. Draven was still talking, however.

“We’re hoping that we can find Dr. Erso’s alleged planted flaw in time to attempt an attack on it when it gets here. It was only a matter of time anyway.”

Cassian nodded, licked his lower lip, still chapped no matter how much they attempted to keep him hydrated in the medbay.

“And – with all due respect, sir – why am I here?”

“Skywalker wants to join as a fighter pilot. I want you to watch the second half of his debrief. We can’t afford to be sloppy right now.”

“General, I would be glad to be of service, but as you can see I’m not in my best right now,” Cassian shuddered, not even bothering to conceal it from the man who had trained him, “haven’t been in a while, actually.”

“Andor, I know you’ve been through a lot, but you’re still one of my best agents – one of the few I have on base right now – the one with most knowledge on this case-“ Cassian had opened his mouth to protest, but Draven put out a hand, “yes, Erso would do as fine a job as you would, but _you_ were Organa’s courier.”

“There isn’t much I know about his business on Tatooine… other than the fact that he had business on Tatooine.”

“I don’t necessarily think Skywalker was related to that, other than his relationship with Kenobi.”

Cassian nodded, figuring that Draven might just order him to watch the kid’s debrief.

“When do I go in?” he asked.

“You don’t,” said Draven, “we’ll stay here.”

Just as the words were out of his mouth, the door to the room Skywalker was in opened and the princess walked in. The kid brightened at her sight, his blue eyes anxious, bright with something between genuine awe and a childish crush. Leia sat down, looked at the food with a gentle curve on her lips, and she leaned her head forward, tilted somewhat considerately.

“Starfruit is native to Yavin IV. I’ve been coming here since I was a child, so I’ve always enjoyed it. We had it back home, but it wasn’t really the same,” her nose wrinkled a bit; she sounded wistful.

“You’ve been with the Rebellion since you were a child?” the kid asked eagerly; Cassian thought he looked to be about the same age as Leia, but that Leia seemed decades older.

War did that to you. He knew that better than most.

She never seemed to lose her smile, even if now it was a sad one, “lots of us have been in this fight since we were kids. I was involved because of my parents.”

“Right.”

“What about _your_ parents?”

The young man resumed munching on his starfruit, seemed to consider his words.

“Never knew them. My uncle and aunt raised me. I’ve just recently found out that- that my father was murdered. He was a Jedi, like Ben.”

Draven and Cassian exchanged a look, but neither let the other know what they were thinking. Cassian felt mostly out of his depth. Sure Palpatine was said to be a Sith Lord and the same applied to the man who was said to be his right-hand, but the Jedi were supposedly extinct, the first immediate casualties of the Empire. Among the Imperials he had been around undercover, the Force was a compulsory taboo.

“How did you know Ben?”

Luke frowned, “oh, he was just this friendly old hermit...”

He looked at Draven again and the general just shrugged.

Skywalker was picking on the pink grapes on his plate, delaying eating them.

“The day I went looking for R2,” he took a rather shaky breath and Leia put a hand on his forearm, “I was attacked by Sand People – Tuskens, they’re called, they’re these nomads on Tatooine, very territorial and aggressive – and Ben saved me. Turns out he was the man R2 had been looking for along. Then we talked, we saw your message and he told me about my father. Said I could become a Jedi like him, if I followed him to-… Alderaan.”

“Then what happened?”

“Stormtroopers were looking for the droids,” Cassian saw that the boy was fighting the urge to cry, “they reached my uncle and aunt and I was… I was too late. Ben said I would have been killed, too, had I been there and I suppose he was right. If it weren’t for R2 and Ben…”

“I’m sorry, Luke,” said Leia, all warm compassion, and he felt more than a little sullied to be watching an exchange that looked like more than a debrief, “I’m so, so sorry.”

The young man looked up into Leia’s eyes, a storm surging in his own clear irises, “I want to fight. I want to help you destroy the Death Star.”

“The perfect recruit,” Cassian mumbled to Draven, shrugging, because most of their stories were sorely similar.

“All right, Andor,” Draven said, “go back to medbay and get some rest.”

Cassian maneuvered the hover chair towards the door, but stopped before getting out.

“Her planet was blown up and you put her up for a debrief?” The words were out of his mouth before he could stop them. He figured he could blame the meds later.

“Like I said before, she asked me,” replied the general, “she said she trusted him, but that she should have been more careful.”

With that, Cassian nodded and left.

He waved away the officers that had come to escort him from medbay and found the way there on his own. Dr. Vitaan was talking to a med droid when he arrived and he asked if he could have a word.

“May I be discharged?” he asked without preamble.

The doctor sighed and pinched the prominent bridge of her nose like she knew this was coming.

“You’ll need physical therapy,” she said with her red eyes sternly fixed on his, “you still need to keep your leg elevated. I want you here everyday for exercises and routine checks.”

He nodded, like the good soldier that he was, but he felt the edge of a smile slipping from his face, “you trust me that much, doctor?”

“No, I don’t. I’m letting you go _precisely_ because I know that if I don’t, you’ll do something stupid.”

Well, he had to respect that. He _had_ gone rogue before.

 

*

 

He was let go with a whole load of paraphernalia: crutches, meds, a datapad with very clear instructions on what he could and could not do, all of that being carried by a med droid while he steered the hoverchair he had used to go to his meeting with Draven. When he got to his quarters, he found the sheets rumpled like a herd of nerfs had at some point made themselves comfortable on them, an empty container of food from the mess hall, and a standard issue duffel he couldn’t identify on the floor. His chest warmed at the sight of these little remains, but he shook his head to clear it.

The droid asked him if he needed help getting the room in some order and he happily accepted because while his training with the Alliance made him appreciate order and cleanliness, he found himself quite inept at the task of making a bed while on a hoverchair.

When it was done, it helped him from the chair to the bunk, and he was left there with nothing to do. Draven had so far given him access to whatever was going on only where he had genuinely wanted his input, apparently. He checked his datapad and saw that there were no reports for him to read, no reports asked of him to fill out yet. So he was left skimming the HoloNet for anything that might interest him.

At what must have been about half an hour later, the door swished open and he had to contain the urge to jump to his feet.

Jyn stood there in her fatigues, half-heartedly holding on to her crutches. Her eyes were blown wide at the sight of him, her cheeks surprisingly flushed.

“You’re out.”

“Yes.”

“This is your room.”

“Yes.”

She looked honestly embarrassed and wasn’t making any effort to hide it, which told him just how distressed she was by his presence.

“I’ll- I’ll grab my things-“

This was all so very stupid.

“Jyn.”

She stopped midway in stooping to grab her bag, muttering something about the Death Star plans, and looked at him. He had to bite down a smile because this was something that had always struck him about her, even as they met for the first time all those years ago: she never shied away from meeting his eyes full-on, even she knew that she wouldn’t necessarily like what she saw there.

“I know about the plans. Come here,” he said, repeating his words to her from the night before.

She dusted her hands on the legs of her uniform and tucked Kestrel Sward’s stylish bangs behind her ears. She walked up to the side of the bed and he gestured for her to sit at the edge of it. She complied and kept her hands on her knees, in a somewhat odd rigid stance. He made for her, picked her left hand up and traced the thin scar she had running down the side of her thumb towards her wrist and that he had always watched her cover seamlessly with make-up while they were living together; it hadn't been convenient for a logistics technician from the Core worlds to have any visible scars.

“Where did you get this?”

“Ord Mantell,” her voice was soft.

“How?”

She huffed, a bit annoyed, but didn’t pull her hand from his grip, “what do you want, Cassian?”

He took a deep breath, looked down at the scar again, and thought of the many others he had caught glimpses of in the times they had changed in front of each other either in their apartment or in their safe house in Imperial Center: the curved one down the right side of her back, the mottled one from a blaster burn of her left calf, and countless others he couldn’t very well remember where precisely they were. Like his, her scars were too many.

“I want to know you,” something breathy came out of her mouth, like a laugh and he tugged her closer, “all I could think on that kriffing beach was how I don’t really know you. I mean, I do, but I-“

“Yes,” she replied.

He leaned forward and faintly registered that his back hadn’t hurt with the movement as he caught her face with his other hand and kissed her. She leaned towards him and somehow ended up almost on his lap as her lips responded with fierceness that little resembled the kisses they had traded in the past for the benefit of an audience. This was the woman that was always underlying the one the Alliance had him married to and the one he had always felt the urge to see at the end of a hard day during that mission; she was like a raging forest fire, he thought dumbly, as her large teeth sunk on his lower lip. He couldn’t help but growl underneath her.

She pulled back a bit, only she so could mumble, “tell me if I’m hurting you.”

He tried to nod his head, but he was so pressed up against her, he felt she could hardly have sensed the movement. He tugged her jacket from her shoulders as her arms slid from around his neck and he felt her lips on it, which sent a jolt through him that he felt down his knees.

Jyn looked positively feral as she felt him over his uniform trousers and promptly unbuckled his belt with her eyes trained on his. He dimly thought of the extense list of recommendations on his datapad and swallowed hard.

“Jyn-“

“Oh, don’t worry, I’m not going to do anything Dr. Vitaan would find life-threatening,” she said, licking her lips.

He could think of worse ways of being sent back to the medbay.

 

*

 

“What does it look like?”

He was lying on his left side, naked except from the immobilizing boot on his right leg, with Jyn being all warm and curiously soft at his back, idly tracing her lower lip down the back of his neck. He supposed he had never felt so alive in his life, which was ironic giving that only a few days ago he had been pretty sure he was dead. 

Her fingers found the raised skin on small of his back where it travelled up his spine. It hadn't hurt as he finally had sex with someone while being himself, but Jyn had done most of the moving around, her body working a sweat over his that she was now drying against him and the sheets that the poor droid had just so recently tucked back in place.

“Just another scar,” he felt the words rather than heard them.

She tugged him by the shoulder to lie on his back, checking with a questioning look to see if he was comfortable. On his assent, she slid easily over his torso, all soft curves and hardened muscle, resting her chin on the hands she had laid on his chest. He twitched all over at the contact.

“I saw the Princess before,” she said quietly.

He peered at her from underneath where his hair had fallen over his eyes.

“So did I,” he stilled her hand when it came to brush his hair back, “Jyn, the Death Star is coming here.”

She adjusted herself to lay over him, her grip on him just a touch stronger.

“Good. Now we can destroy it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really hope I haven't butchered Luke and Leia. I always thought Leia was more calculating than she appeared and I hope that it seems plausible that Draven would rely on Cassian to see if anything was amiss. I also really wanted for Luke to deal somewhat with the death of his uncle and aunt. 
> 
> This is as far as smut writing goes for me at the moment. Maybe some day I'll venture to write more. 
> 
> Two more chapter and we're done. I can't really believe it. Thanks to those who have been keeping up with this nonsense.


	24. Stardust

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This, like the rest of this story, will need to be edited after I'm done with it. It's also a humble offering to the gods and goddesses of the end of the semester. Please be over, 2017. 
> 
> Thank you all for reading. I'm estherlyon on tumblr if you want to come and scream at me to finish this.

Jyn dreamed she was back at the data vault, watching Cassian fall down after being shot by Krennic. His name echoed in her voice around her and she didn’t bat an eyelash, just started climbing using the data tapes for leverage, lower and lower until her feet touched the durasteel platform where he lay sprawled, blood seeping from a cut in the corner of his mouth, his leg bent in every wrong way she could imagine. For a second, she thought he was dead, but then she heard gasping and a faint moan. She stood there looking at him helplessly as his groans grew louder and louder, until her eyes opened and she woke up, her heart painfully stuttering in her chest. She was naked, lying crookedly half on top of an equally undressed Cassian, who was also deep into a nightmare, breathing so hard she felt it rip a hole in her own set of lungs.

She didn’t want to startle him, so she ran a hand over his hair, her thumb over the space between his eyebrows where they were scrunched and over his cheekbones, gliding her fingers over to where his jaw pressed up against them.

“It’s all right,” she whispered, “I’m here. If you’re in pain you need to wake up so we can take care of it.”

His eyes fluttered open and took a few seconds to focus. His right hand ran a smooth path over her back, leaving her more than a little breathless, because she wasn’t used to Cassian touching that much of her bare skin, regardless of what they had done before falling asleep. The only reason she didn’t outward panic was because his face took that same softness it had back in the turbolift on Scarif and that was enough to leave her pinned to his body, feeling his breath evening out beneath her. Something must have snagged at him because he grimaced.

“Is it your back? Your ribs?”

He tucked a tendril of her hair behind her ear and whispered, his voice heavy with sleep, his accent just a bit more gravelly, “back, but it’s the muscles, not the spine.”

She propped her right arm on the bunk’s mattress, “think you can move?”

“I think I can. I don’t think I want to,” he said, hugging her to him a little tighter.

“Don’t be silly,” she said, feeling heat radiating off the back of her neck and from her cheeks, “you were groaning in your sleep.”

“I woke you up.”

“I wasn’t having a good time of it myself.”

He adjusted her so he could nuzzle her shoulder, the newness of which distracted her. She wasn’t as adaptable as Cassian, she felt. When she had come into his room to find him there and he had talked her out of running from him by saying that he wanted to _know her_ , she had promptly taken things under her control, admittedly using the fact that his movements were limited to her advantage. It had been all she could do to stop herself from panicking.

Cassian skimmed his teeth where her shoulder met her neck and she buckled into him, at which he snickered like she had never heard him do before. In retaliation, she ran whatever she could of her short nails down the side of his torso and he inhaled sharply. However, the moan he smothered next against her skin wasn’t one of pleasure.

“All right, spy boy,” she said, trying her best to ignore the hardness she felt begin to dig against her thigh, “you know what you need?”

He hummed in response, inching his fingers down towards the small of her back.

“If your back muscles are the problem, you need a hot shower.”

“Spy boy?” he asked and she leaned back to better look at him; sure enough he was shooting her one of his non-smiles.

She felt her cheeks burn. It had been years since she had last thought of him with that nickname, the most private of allusions to him that her brain had come up with in the first months of their assignment. It had made sense, then, because he had looked less hardened, with his smooth cheeks and a softness she knew she also had on her face. Three years on that mission had taken a toll on them that at least in her case even a lifetime of running with Saw’s cadre hadn’t stitched on her body. Sure she had seen and done things an eight-year-old wasn’t supposed to see and do, but the first time she had spotted gray among the darkness of her full head of hair had been on the turbolift mirror of their apartment building in Imperial Center. Jyn knew little about Cassian’s time with the Alliance before meeting her, bet that it hadn’t been easy, since she could tell from the beginning that going undercover as an Imp hadn’t been a first for him. So she explained the nickname, idly tapping her fingers on the planes of his chest as she spoke, trying to keep the embarrassment at bay. He huffed indignantly.

“I’m older than you, you know.”

“Yes. Stop deflecting. You think you can get up and take a shower?”

“You’ll help me?”

“Of course.”

She slipped from his embrace, shivering at the loss of contact, and reached for the nearby chrono to see what time it was. It was 0100, the perfect time for an impromptu shower in the communal ‘fresher that otherwise would have been deemed weird, if not inappropriate, between two officers.

But she hadn’t entirely thought this through, because as she stood up naked next to the bunk and started rummaging for her clothes among his, she felt his eyes on her and suddenly she felt very, very exposed.

“What are you looking at?” it came out sharper than she had intended to.

“You,” he replied, a bit taken aback.

She tremulously put her clothes back on, half buttoning her fatigues as she sorted Cassian’s and put them on the bed. They had pulled off his immobilizing boot before, so he just carefully managed to tug on his trousers. When he was ready, she offered him her shoulder and for the first time since arriving back, unconscious and bleeding on the cargo hold of Rogue One, he stood up.

He was breathing a bit a hard, but nodded to her in assurance as she reached for his crutches and settled them underneath each one of his arms. He took a tentative step and laughed a bit as he managed to reach the door to his room.

“Not bad,” he said, and though he sounded a little out of breath, his face was its normal color and he didn’t appear to be in worse pain than he had been lying down.

It took them a while, but they reached the communal showers without any incident, the sound of the synthrubber tips of Cassian’s crutches the only one they heard in the empty base corridors. Jyn took care of their things as Cassian picked a stall and managed to stand naked under the shower head with one crutch for support. It was through a cloud of steam and awkwardness, when both were under the water, that Cassian spoke again.

“I’m going to miss this,” his voice ricocheted off the tile walls.

She looked at him quizzically, halfway through filling the palm of her hand with soap from the dispenser in the stall.

“If we make it,” he knew he didn’t need to explain himself, “wherever the new base is, I hope there are water showers.”

She hummed in agreement, and pulled him towards her in order to lather him from head to toe, rubbing her thumbs against the knots she could feel on his lower back, trying not to feel too embarrassed when she reached certain parts of his body. She worked methodically, not even thinking about this new level of intimacy meant, worried only about getting him some relief from the pain and to get the smells of the medbay off his skin; in bed, he had still tasted of bacta and the tanginess associated with medical supplies. She could feel his eyes on her, curious and with something else in their edges she couldn’t quite feel comfortable thinking about, and before she had reached his neck and his face, she dealt with it by kissing him and while at it, backing him underneath the spray.

When he was rinsed and she was getting ready to wash herself, he leaned against the shower wall. She couldn’t understand what he was up to until, taking advantage of the fact that she was half propping him up, he reached down and let his free hand roam the inside of her thigh.

“Cassian-“

“Shh,” he mumbled, cradling her closer with his free arm and suddenly holding her entirely in the palm of his other hand.

She closed her eyes, tightly, and could only feel _him_ , his breath on her neck, his voice whispering the sweetest of encouragements, the hard planes of his chest against the side of hers. Her breath hitched, his fingers quickened and she muffled a shout on his shoulder, while he dropped a kiss against her wet hair, a huffed laugh escaping his mouth. She sunk her teeth on his collarbone.

“And then I’m the reckless one,” she said, voice as wobbly as her legs, kicking him out from under the water so she could finish her shower in peace.

It was close to 0230 when they returned to his quarters, hair still dripping over their uniforms, to a couple of stale nutrient bars and finally some decent sleep.

If the Death Star was indeed coming, if the Rebel fleet failed to destroy it, then Jyn figured she and Cassian at least had had _this_.

*

Of course they would bar her from the briefing on the Death Star plans the next day. Jyn fumed silently, watching as the orange-clad fighter pilots all went into the large briefing room after a tall silver protocol droid told her she wasn’t on the list of those allowed to be there in a prissy voice, as if she were trying to get a table at some kriffing restaurant in the upper levels of Imperial Center.

It took Mon farking Mothma seeing her standing there like an idiot for her to be treated as if it were actually the intel she had very nearly died getting that they were about to discuss in there.

“Sergeant Erso,” the woman’s calm voice had never rankled Jyn’s nerves more, “you wish to watch the briefing.”

Jyn let the look on her face be answer enough. She wasn’t about to rattle off what she thought were the very obvious reasons she deserved to be in there. Cassian was back at the medbay being poked and prodded at, Bodhi was Force knew where; she had presumed at this point that they weren’t about to let him fly in the attack on the Death Star.

Mothma nodded, and with a cautious hand on her shoulders, gestured for Jyn to walk into the room. She chose a spot at the back, behind the last row of pilots and in front of the few helmeted guards in the room. Despite wishing to watch what Alliance command had to say about her father’s plans, she was in no mood to attract attention to herself. Leia was at the front, her hair braided in what Jyn vaguely knew was an Alderaanian ceremonial style which she remembered the princess wearing even as they met. As everyone settled in the room, she spoke a few words to a bearded man Jyn identified as Jan Dodonna before settling in the sidelines. On the wall behind Dodonna, Jyn felt her skin prickling with goose bumps as the schematics she had seen in a tiny screen on the data vault on Scarif appeared projected before her eyes.

“The battle station is heavily shielded and carries a fire power greater than half a star fleet. Its defenses are designed around a direct large-scale assault. A small one-man fighter should to penetrate the outer defense.”

The corner of her eye caught movement near the door, where a Wookie and a man dressed in typical smuggler clothes gesticulated between them as the general spoke. Before they had fallen asleep the first time around the previous night, Cassian had mentioned the unlikely pair as the ones behind Leia’s rescue. She turned her attention back to the briefing just as someone was posing a question to Dodonna.

“Pardon me for asking, sir, but what good are snub-fighters going to be against _that_?”

“Well, the Empire does not consider a small one-man fighter to be any threat, or they’d have a tighter defense,” Jyn held her breath, “an analysis of the plans provided by Princess Leia has demonstrated a weakness in the battle station. The approach will not be easy.”

_Oh, Papa._

The general continued speaking, “you’re required to maneuver straight down this trench and skim the surface to this point… The target area is only two meters wide. It’s a small thermal exhaust port right below the main port.”

Everyone in the room seemed to grow restless as Dodonna spoke. Jyn felt she knew the next words that came out of the general’s mouth by heart.

“A precise hit will start a chain reaction which should destroy the station. Only a precise hit will set up a chain reaction.”

Her father’s voice in the recording at Saw’s rang in her heard.

_“Any pressurized explosion to the reactor module will set off a chain reaction that will destroy the entire station.”_

She took advantage of the fact that everyone in the room was focused on how hard this would be to achieve in order to dry her eyes. Silently, she thanked Dodonna for not mentioning her father’s name or hers – Draven’s orders, no doubt. As relieved as she was that her father had come through for the Rebellion in the end, she rather wished she were invisible.

“The shaft is ray-shielded, so you’ll have to use proton torpedoes,” Dodonna finished.

Apparently, the pilots watching the briefing had had enough.

“That’s impossible,” a particularly young-looking one said, “even for a computer.”

A funnily-dressed blond boy sitting next to him leaned sideways with the sort of infuriating calm that reminded her briefly of Chirrut.

“That’s _not_ impossible,” he said, “I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my T-16 back home and they’re not much bigger than two meters.”

Jyn felt incredulous laughter bubble up in her mouth, but contained herself. Who _was_ that guy?

The briefing broke off after Dodonna commanded the pilots to their ships, wishing for the Force to accompany them. Jyn’s eyes followed the blonde in the farmer’s outfit, who immediately ran to Leia’s orbit and then took off, no doubt to get changed into a uniform. She found herself walking towards the hangar, fiddling with the crystal at her neck. The humidity of the day had cleared a bit with the approach of noon and her ankle felt like new. Pilots bustled around her: she watched some run, some offer tearful goodbyes to Rebels in other divisions, the blond farmer from before apparently got into an argument with the smuggler, who seemed oblivious to the battle call. A few seconds later, she watched as he spoke with Leia again and the princess sent him off with a shy kiss on the cheek.

Jyn knew better than anyone what crazy-ass rescues and missions did to human relationships.

As that thought crossed her mind, she heard the clunking of crutches behind her and she whirled around, slightly alarmed.

“I’m okay,” Cassian said, as an orange-clad pilot sped past them towards an X-wing, “nothing hurts.”

She searched his eyes, but found no evidence that he might be lying to appease her. Jyn had to admit to herself that had felt slightly guilty after the previous night and at the thought, she felt her cheeks bursting heat like the engines on the ships around them. Cassian seemed equally discomfited, his eyes wide and earnest, hair tucked around his ears, which only brought out the sharpness of his features. He looked painfully young. As she opened her mouth to speak again, white silk unfurled briefly in front of her.

“Aach?”

Cassian came to attention at some ridiculously formal stance, eyes sharp once again.

“ _Infanta_ ,” he replied solemnly.

Princess Leia was shorter than Jyn - Jyn had always noticed that to her own satisfaction – so the princess had to look up even higher to meet Cassian’s eyes.

“Don’t,” she replied in Basic, at which Cassian began to apologize, something that made Leia look like she wanted to rip his head off.

Jyn stepped up, feeling like she ought to diffuse the tension, “what sort of a code name is that?”

Leia’s lips curved fondly, “it was my father’s idea. I have to admit, though, that you two together is an interesting mix.”

Jyn did _not_ know what to think of that assessment. She just stood there dumbly looking at her childhood – companion? Acquaintance? She had never known the extent of her and Leia’s comradeship. She also supposed that with the Death Star approaching and an imminent battle on the way, she had little time to waste worrying about what someone else thought of her and Cassian’s relationship, whatever that meant. The princess seemed to be on the same page.

“Aren’t you coming?” she asked, gathering the skirts of her robes in one hand as to easily walk off.

Jyn turned to Cassian, offered help and he shook his head in the negative, quietly following as Leia marched to the War Room. At some point along the way, they were joined by a golden protocol droid, whose joints cricked loudly as it walked. As they walked into the room, men and women in muted grays were quietly at work in their stations with earphones on, others were looking over charts and speaking quietly on comlinks. Cassian put his weight on the side of one such chart panels, his arms carefully folded over his chest, head down, as if refusing to look at the strategy table a few steps away. Jyn hung back with him, watching as Leia took position next to another operative.

_“Stand by alert,”_ came a voice through the speakers, _“Death Star approaching. Estimated time to firing range: fifteen minutes.”_

Leia’s response to that announcement was simply to blink and keep her eyes trained on the diagram before her. Jyn squeezed her hand in the fold of Cassian’s right arm and his fingers found hers, their tips brushing against her skin almost as an afterthought.

As the fighters approached the Death Star, Jyn tried to focus on their chatter over the comms. One of them found it pertinent to comment on the size of the battle station, only to be immediately reprimanded. As soon as they got into attack position, the sounds of cannon fire started echoing in the room. It was a novel position for Jyn to find herself in: cut away from the action, entirely vulnerable to the beast of her father’s own making with no way to escape this time that she knew of. The only thing in common with all the other situations was Cassian’s hand in hers, even if this time concealed from other people’s view.

The farmer boy, Red Five – who they also called Luke – went in and apparently peppered the station with cannon fire, much like his comrades were doing. Leia tensed up when he said he “got a little cooked”, but was “okay” as she blatantly ignored the approaching generals alongside her on the table. Cassian had his head still down, focused as if he could help the fighters on the space above them by sheer force of will, the greens from the displays playing on his features. It didn’t take long for them to have their first casualty, a pilot whose name Jyn didn’t catch, but who had previously inflicted some damage to the station.

An operative with a headphone turned away from the control stations, which drew Cassian’s attention and therefore hers as well. The man spoke cautiously.

“Squad leaders, we’ve picked up a new group of signals,” Jyn’s breath hitched despite herself, “enemy fighters, coming your way.”

She was thrown back to the harrowing seconds she spent being chased by one of those things, feeling like her shoulders were on fire after being left hanging on the Citadel’s destroyed catwalk with the entirety of her body weight relying on torn ligaments.

_“My scope’s negative,”_ said Luke, _“I don’t see anything.”_  

Despite that, it didn’t take long for the sound of TIE fighters’ fire to fill the room and the Rebel X-wings to begin being picked off one by one. The squadrons broke into different groups in an attempt to clear the way of the fighters, but apparently those efforts weren’t enough. Leia seemed invested specifically on the well being of Red Five, sighing in relief when a pilot called Wedge picked off the enemy fighter pursuing him. Then, the pilot whose call sign was Gold Leader announced their first attempt at an attack run.

_“Death Star should be in range in five minutes,”_ came the announcement in the middle of the comm chatter, and Jyn settled just a bit closer to Cassian’s side.

The sound of cannon fire was at first deafening as Gold Leader and his fighters mounted their run, but then they suddenly stopped. The silence was odd, but brief, as they were each shot in quick succession by incoming fighters. Dodonna wasted no time in ordering the Red squadron to start their own attempt. Red leader managed to try a shot at the exhaust port while the rest of his squadron took on most of the fire from the Imperials, but he hit only the surface of the battle station. Like one of those things that made fate seem entirely too cruel, Red Leader was shot down just seconds after telling the rest of his squadron to start their run. Red Five, now apparently leading the attack, briefly compared it to something called “Beggar’s Canyon back home”, which made Jyn turn her gaze to Cassian.

He was smirking, for some reason.

“That’s the new recruit,” he mumbled, as the edge of Jyn’s vision caught Dodonna placing a comforting hand on Leia’s shoulder, “the one from Tatooine.”

“He got the princess out,” she replied, “and seems too kriffing optimistic about everything.”

“His father was a Jedi,” he said, his face entirely too neutral to be saying something so outlandish.

Soon enough, though, the cannon towers on the Death Star weren’t their only worry, and Jyn and Cassian settled in silence once more, letting the pilots’ chatter echo between them. The one called Wedge was told to get clear by Red Five, the one named Biggs was shot down soon afterwards, and just like that, the blond farmer with the outrageous analogies was left alone in the trench with the Death Star within thirty seconds of being able to pulverize them.

“His computer’s off,” said a grave voice in the War Room.

“Oh, kriff,” Jyn mumbled, her heart feeling like it was hot lead in her throat.

“Luke, you switched off your targeting computer,” said the comm operator, “what’s wrong?”

_“Nothing,”_ the boy replied and Jyn would strangle him if she could, no matter how faithful she was in the Force, _“I’m alright.”_

“He’s trying to be a kriffing hero,” she said, but Cassian didn’t reply, only turned those delicate eyes of his on her and her ears immediately started ringing.

_I am one with the Force and the Force is with me_.

She felt like her mother’s crystal was scalding against the skin of her neck and so she fished it from under her uniform shirt with the hand that wasn’t bunching the sleeve of Cassian’s jacket like it was a lifeline, and brought it close to her lips.

_Please_.

_“I lost R2,”_ Luke’s voice sounded to the consternation of all. 

Not only that, but apparently the Death Star now had them in their aim. Jyn’s legs wobbled a bit and she held on to Cassian, trained her eyes on Leia, who seemed almost impassive before the same weapon she had watched destroy her home world.

Something, however, came through at the last second. A whoop, followed by a crackling transmission with the sort of chatter that was way out of the norm for a Rebellion fighter.

_“You’re all clear, kid. Now let’s blow this thing and go home.”_

And just like that, a shot was heard, a small sigh escaped over the comlink from Red Five, and Home Base on Yavin IV exploded, not in destruction, but with hoots and cheers and laughter. Leia ran off, the protocol droid noisily trying to keep up with her, and Cassian fell, down and down, until he reached the solid ground beneath him, and Jyn found herself in a heap at his side, their fingers laced, two sets of hands trembling in relief. Their lips found each other, much too feverish for it to be in public, his then found her hairline, and she couldn’t help but mumble Chirrut’s prayer for a bit against the hollow of his throat and as she ran her fingers over his cheekbones and his crooked nose. Then she broke down and found herself sobbing on his shoulder.

Jyn had never felt more vulnerable in her life. She had never felt stronger.


	25. To live with you

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter will be slightly recognizable to those who watch The Americans. It took forever for me to find the right tone, though. 
> 
> Only an epilogue left! 
> 
> Thank you so much for reading this and leaving kudos/commenting. It means the world to me.

Every time the electronic bell on the door sounded, he lifted his head from the datapad and looked up. The cup of caf in front of him was already cold and he couldn’t muster the will to order another from the rather pissy Aqualish server, who was definitely having a bad day. He tried to focus on the chatter coming from behind him in the holo projection of the ICC instead, listening to the habitual drone of local news: a fight that broke out due to a speeder accident and that resulted in two men badly injured; a shipment of spice being apprehended at some space port he couldn’t catch the name of; renovations being planned for Diadem square. To anyone else looking, he was just another bored patron in a diner in Coronet City. Inside, he felt the urge to start fidgeting his right leg, the one that hurt on rainy days.

It was a fact, however, that Fil Jenn – a salesmen from Mantooine – was not a man usually caught fidgeting. He was supposed to be debonair, to not mind the Imperial order as long as it was good for business. He ran a hand over his whiskers which clashed with his longish white hair, and tore his eyes from the door with the vain hope that if he stopped watching it, the person he was expecting to come through it would appear.

The bell sounded again, but it was just a couple of teenage girls who eyed him momentarily, shrugged, and went to order protein shakes at the counter. He tried absently to take a sip of the contents of his mug, but if the caf there was bad while almost at boiling point, it was absolutely undrinkable when lukewarm. He was tilting the mug so he could look at the bottom of it, at what some Outer Rim cultures used as a fortune-telling device, when he caught something with the corner of his eyes. He lowered his hand to his blaster just in case, but when he looked up he found a pair of very familiar lips curved at him.

“Fil?” said the voice he had been aching to hear, though with the hint of a Corellian accent.

“I suppose you’re Elz,” he replied, fighting down a smile.

His companion was beautiful, wearing a very skimpy loose tank top over a bright orange breast band, all covered with a light jacket. He moved the hand that was on his blaster a bit further under the table and “accidentally” knocked a knee that was under what appeared to be synthleather trousers. He was kicked by one of a pair of sturdy-boots – bought, no doubt, at a Coronet City boutique – and a couple of bracelets clanked against each other as the woman he had met on the HoloNet dating service rested her chin on her right hand. She was Elz Nadd – an Echani art instructor with an interest in podracing and whose acerbic humor Fil had found irresistible. Her eyes were welcoming, despite the light kick on the shins she aimed at him.

“So we finally meet,” she said breezily, looking around the diner, “this is a cool joint.”

He sucked the underside of his lower lip between his teeth, “are you going to ask me if I come here often?”

Her honey colored eyes darted to his mouth, but then peered into his caf mug as she turned to the Aqualish, who had been hovering nearby. 

“Do you have any tea?" 

They settled for simply looking at each other in silence when the server left and he was slightly thrown by how _shy_ she actually seemed, despite the whole brazen get up of someone who taught beings to beat the kriff out of others for a living. She tucked a strand of her blond hair behind her left ear, the bright blue tips brushing against her shoulder. The steaming cup of red tea landed in front of her as they continued to take each other in. She blew over the cup, ran a carefully manicured nail over the rim.

“So are you alone in Coronet?” he finally asked, after ascertaining that she looked fine, despite the insecurity he could pick up in the edge of her eyes.

“A friend,” she smiled, “it’d be great if you guys met, actually.”

He raised his eyebrows at her, something snagging funnily at the pit of his stomach, “friend from work?”

“You could say that,” she replied with a touch of transparent fondness.

He grew uneasy with that information and wanted, suddenly, more than anything, to leave that diner for what their final destination that evening actually was. Whoever it was that she had met here on Corellia, this was not on what he thought were their plans and he wanted to get over with whatever the hell that was about as soon as possible. She sensed his impatience, smiled calmly over the sloshing tea.

“How have you been?” she asked demurely.

He shrugged, sat back and attempted to play it cool by draping an arm over the back of the booth seat.

“I’ve been good. I told you I had an accident podracing once… Well, those injuries haven’t bothered me most days. Business is, I find, a bit boring,” _well, there it goes,_ he thought, “I- I miss my old colleagues.”

She hummed and before he could say anything, finished her tea with a gulp, “I know what you mean. Shall we?”

He shot up so quickly that she was slightly alarmed and his vision blacked out a bit with the movement. _Shavit_ , he thought bitterly. He tossed enough credit chips to their server as they walked out and it took all his will power not to put an arm around Elz’s shoulders as they found themselves on the street, casually strolling towards the nearest spaceport.

Port authorities didn’t blink as they strode past, flashing their scandocs and Elz’s ship license, even though he at least could tell – now that she wasn’t sitting across from him at a table – that underneath her get up she was armed enough to kill him a hundred times over; he even spied on her belt those spice sprays that fems took to carrying around in bustling cities like Coronet in a measure against harassment. As she paused in front of the battered Mandalorian shuttle, she spoke into a comlink at her wrist, a Core accent that sounded like a balm to his ears slipping through her teeth.

“We’re here.”

The ramp into the cargo hold smoothly opened and Elz subtly shoved him inside. What he saw in there made his heart stop for a couple of seconds.

“Well, finally. I was getting bored,” said the large KX series droid whose neck was slightly stooped under the low ceiling.

Elz Nadd shut the ramp as soon as possible, so he could react appropriately to that very thoughtful surprise.

 

*

 

They were in hyperspace when he came behind her in one of the ship’s private cabins. He found her methodically tucking her bracelets and huge copper earrings inside a velvet pouch, her boots off her feet strewn by her side. Her eyes were turned dusty green, wide as she looked at him through the mirror on the locker’s door in front of her, her lips parted giving him a hint of her large teeth. After they had broken atmo, he had hid inside a cabin himself and shrugged his hair out of its confines, slipped his fingers between his eyelids and plucked away at the blue silicone irises.

“Hi,” he said, marveling at how small his voice sounded.

“Hey,” she breathed back and started pulling the blond wig with the blue tips from her hair, “help me with this?”

Never in a million years the woman standing in front of him had asked him before for help with the pins restricting her brown hair. It was a measure of trust, he found, even greater than the moments they had shared in the last time they had seen each other, on what was now an abandoned moon in the Yavin system, five months before. But then, he thought, she had brought him into this ship and given him back his best friend, whose voice had echoed in its dying tones in his head for the entire time their bosses had scattered them both and others like them across the Galaxy in an effort to find them a new home.

He tugged at one pin, then the next, and marveled at the soft brown waves that tumbled down towards her shoulders, inching closer and closer to her body until he caught the whiff of something sweet that must be in her hair wash – a far cry from the neutral stuff in the dispenser back on base. He was honestly considering if it was too forward a move to simply bite into the flesh of her neck, but then her hands swooped her jacket off her torso and his eyes caught an entire continent of purple, blue and green stretching from the side of her neck and down her left scapula on what was visible under the tank top and the bright orange underwear.

“Jyn,” he hissed and he watched through the mirror as she rolled her eyes.

“It’s nothing,” she shrugged, though her nose crinkled at the movement, “just some trouble before I got here. Good thing I had Kay to watch my back.”

The droid had explained to him how, in the evacuation from Yavin IV, she had smuggled out his backup and as soon as the missions Draven had her running allowed, she had made her way to the Outer Rim. Jyn found a chassis similar to K-2SO on a smuggling hub off Mandalore, where she had also acquired the ship they were now on. The chassis had been battered and had taken a lot of polishing up, but a few oil baths later and Kay hadn’t been complaining a lot. On most days, that was.

His reply was a long-suffering sigh. They hadn’t exchanged many messages in the past five months; at first it had been mostly to tell each other they were alive and in one piece. The ones towards the end were focused in setting up their meeting after an exchange in which they each revealed that Command had finally sent for them without any explanation. They figured Draven wouldn’t mind if they arrived together, since the summons had no particular instructions. They knew more than most how to be careful, after all.

Or so Cassian thought, he grimaced, moving the strip of Jyn’s tank top aside so he could survey exactly how badly she was bruised.

She huffed and turned around, batting his hands away.

“I’m _fine_ ,” she said.

She reached a hand up and swept his hair out of his eyes, shaking her head and mumbling something in Bocce he didn’t fully understand, something about his hair always getting in the way. And that did it for him. Cassian laced his fingers through the belt hoops of her trousers and crashed his lips to hers because it had been too kriffing long since the last time he had done this, and three years doing it out of careful calculation couldn’t compare to the feel of it as it had been on those entirely too short days they had spent together on Yavin IV between the Death Star plans being found and the battle station being destroyed. 

The afternoon it had happened, after Jyn had almost smothered Bodhi with her awkward hugs, they had found Tonc, watched a delirious Leia from afar and been formally introduced to the young man who had finally made use of Jyn’s father sabotage. Then they had both huddled together in Cassian’s quarters, all alone once again, almost as they had been in their apartment back on Coruscant, except that now Jyn looked at him with something in her eyes that was so unspeakably soft he was entirely afraid to spoil it. He had learned the entirety of scars and freckles on her body and listened to her real laughter – which he found had just a slight pinch of Kestrel’s in it –, almost always too incredulous whenever he made any jokes.

They didn’t talk about the future. This was the _third_ kriffing time they had escaped a weapon almost the size of a planet. They didn’t even talk of their feelings. Not explicitly, at least. In the back of his head, Cassian knew that all the molten metal that he was finding at the core of one Jyn Erso spoke less of her fears regarding that future than of not believing that they could have one. While most people spent the night the Death Star was destroyed drunk out of their minds in celebration of their victory and in remembrance of those who had perished in its effort, Cassian Andor decided to literally and figuratively bury himself in the woman next to him in his bunk. When their orders came and they were separated, she had kissed him goodbye as sweetly as the other partners in the same predicament as them had and acted like this was just routine. The first morning he woke up without her in bed – the first in three years barring the time he had spent in the medbay – had made his chest heavy as if his lungs were made of durasteel, but he told himself that it was for the best. It wouldn’t do to become codependent.

Right now, though, with her bare arms reaching around his neck and her mouth tasting of flowery tea opening under his, he felt like tossing his reasoning out of an airshaft into the unforgiving vacuum of space.

She drew her head back and ran a finger over his moustache.

“This is for real,” there was the edge of laughter in her voice.

He nodded, “too lazy to keep pulling Fil’s on and off all the time.”

She ran her tongue over her lower lip, considering him, an action that made something zing from the bottom of his prosthetic vertebrae straight to his groin.

“Have to admit I like it.”

He grunted, unthinkingly shoving her against the mirror on the locker door and kissing her again. She whimpered in pain – no doubt because of her bruises – and he drew back with a string of curses being ripped from his lips, but was promptly quieted by her grabbing at the collar of his jacket and pulling him against her with matching strength. Her tongue then scraped the roof of his mouth and he was gone to a place where there was only her and that farking smell in her hair that made him want to taste her like she was some kind of rare delicacy.

She steered him towards the bunk in the cabin, tugging off his jacket, then his shirt off his trousers, then the hidden holster which crisscrossed his torso and his belt, all while she bit and sucked and breathed him in. He ended up sprawled on the thin mattress, watching as she also divested herself fully of Elz Nadd and finally ended up on her knees, not quite straddling him, but definitely domineering. He brought a hand up and tugged at the back of her breast band and there she was, the woman beneath all those layers the Alliance made them wear.

“All right?” she asked and he had to swallow his laughter at her worry, because his back or his leg, whichever she meant, were the least of his concerns right now.

He sat up and she pulled his shirt off, shooting him a sly smile of her own as she tossed it in the general direction of a chair. He huffed in annoyance for a brief second.

“You look like one of those cocky X-Wing pilots,” she murmured, running a hand on his shaved jaw in a way that vaporized his concerns with housekeeping.

He turned his cheek in the palm of her hand, bit into it and then smoothed it with a kiss. Cassian found he was done with joking around and put his hands on her bare waist, warm and sure.

“I missed you, Jyn.”

She didn’t reply. Just slid downwards and onto the whole of him, likewise done with words, funny or not.

 

*

 

Later he found her in the galley, methodically mushing some kind of cured meat with a fork while noodles boiled in a pan on the single plate dish at her elbow. He slid behind her, peering at what she was doing, at the arraign of spices she had pulled from an open cabinet, trying to hold on while his heart did a little somersault because he could see that they were the same powered herbs he had made her try when they lived together, to make her not exactly enjoy the perks of the life they were handed, but to take advantage of some of them.

He nuzzled her hair and was almost putting a hand down the front of her fatigues when he heard something sharply whir behind him.

“Cassian,” said K-2SO, “ _oh_.”

He closed his eyes and waited for the whirring to settle as he slowly turned to face his friend.

“Yes, Kay?”

“I thought you only pretended to be married.”

At his side, Jyn’s head was down; the only part of her body that kept moving was the hand that was slowly mushing the canned meat.

“Yes.” 

“Why are you still displaying the behavior of a married couple?”

Jyn seemed satisfied with the meat. She picked up the pot of noodles, emptied it of water in the sink, placed it on the dish plate and tossed the meat in, stirring it in the noodles with her fork. Cassian watched her out of the corner of his eye, but kept his face turned to the droid.

“Dinner’s ready,” she smiled at Cassian somewhat terrifyingly, “ _darling_.”

“It’s a human thing, Kay. I’ll explain it to you later. I’m afraid Jyn will stab me if I don’t sit down to eat.”

The droid’s joints squeaked slightly as it backed out of the galley, “I suppose you are right.”

“Was there anything you wanted, Kay?”

“Just to tell you that we’ll be arriving at our destination in 0300 hours.”

Cassian found himself nodding as the droid retreated back to the cockpit, but something seemed to stick itself to the back of his head. Three standard hours was all he had with Jyn before debriefs, their ranks and the general bustle of Alliance business separated them again. With Rebellion forces and assets spread thin, they would probably be sent their separate ways again. It would be weeks or months – like it was this first time around –, without properly hearing from her.

He sat at the galley’s small counter as she dug into their food with apparent relish, but he found himself just toying with it. They had never been ones for small talk, but Jyn looked from his bowl of noodles to his face and raised a skeptical eyebrow. He picked up the duraplastic bowl and started walking towards their cabin in search of his datapad.

She didn’t ask as he rifled through the old files he had encrypted on there, just watched him silently, munching through her food like someone who had spent far too long without any in order to fully ignore it. In between forkfuls, he found what he was looking for and spun the datapad towards her.

The aurabesh letters were clear and business-like, entirely too canning. It was a good forgery and, on retrospect, he supposed the Alliance had slicers as good as Jyn when Saw Gerrera had agreed to part with her, so her appeal to Draven must have been more than that. Her eyes hit the document he was showing her and immediately grew wide, her irises glinting almost blue in the weird artificial lighting of the galley.

“Cassian, what-“

Now that he thought about it, if she thought his idea was ridiculous, this would be a very awkward three hours.

But on the other hand, he supposed he had taken worse risks than that in his life; the biggest of them involving the woman sitting across from him.

“This isn’t valid. Not to the Alliance, not anywhere in the Galaxy. And these people – Joreth Sward and Kestrel Dawn – they don’t- they don’t exist anymore. We’re not them,” she nodded and the tension in his stomach dissolved a bit, “I want- I know it’s insane, I know we’re not supposed to do this, but I want- I want you, Jyn.”

She was frowning. Her nimble fingers played with the edges of the datapad. She took a deep breath. 

“I want you, too.”

He looked down and found himself laughing a bit in relief. His fingers found hers, a bit shaky, like his legs that first time she had helped him stand up again five months before. 

“We’ll have clearance to know if anything happens the other,” he said, still trying not to scare her off, to show that this was some kind of _rational_ decision, not to use any words that made this some kind of syrupy thing he was feeling.

But it was. 

She smiled, then, pure and ordinarily, like she had as she transmitted those plans on top of the Citadel tower on Scarif and he had been feeling like his lungs were oozing all of his blood in his insides.

“I know someone who can help us,” she said in a sly tone, “in case you thought of this just now.”

He felt like an idiot. His ears, in particular, felt like they had developed propulsion jets and were about to take off.

She got up, carrying her bowl around with her as he had before, disappearing in the general direction of the cockpit, still munching her food. They continued in their hyperspace lane and as he finished his noodles, he went to see where she had gone. She was at the communications console, with earphones on, the food forgotten at her elbow. He picked it up, inferred that she was listening to a transmission and fed her a forkful of noodles and meat. She chewed with a thankful look in her eyes, swallowed, muttered something he couldn’t fully understand into the microphone and took the earphones off.

“All right,” she said, “we’re going to the Ring of Kafrene.”

 

*

 

Cassian’s parents had been political activists from a young age, involved in a particularly raucous student union on Fest before going to university. As most of such people – people who believed in change and in the possibility of a better Galaxy – they were optimists, deep down, even when the repression of Separatists movements by the Republic turned their situation particularly dismal. Because his life had changed at such an early stage, Cassian had clear memories of a _before_ : before his father died in a protest and before his mother fell to the Empire that followed the regime they opposed. The memories of their faith in improving the lives of others, of there being a way out, however, started to fade as he started to question his own deeds, something dark wrapping around his heart even as he repeated words of liberation and a hopeful future.

He found himself remembering his parents then, a couple nights later, as he didn’t think their optimism could have conjured the image of him, clad in a leather jacket and with a blaster stuck in the back of his trousers, three other vibroblades elsewhere on his person, standing in a closed clerk’s office at 0200 in the morning to be married to an equally or more armed woman, whose blazing green eyes were lined with smudged kohl. His bride had no dress: she was wearing a heavy jacket herself, one made of Bantha hide that seemed to have seen and been through all sorts of things, and that she had called “an heirloom” and therefore proclaimed to be only fitting for the occasion. By the look of it, it was probably something to do with Saw and finding himself surprisingly old-fashioned about this whole thing, he thought it more appropriate to ask questions later.

The person Jyn knew was a Twi’lek who had been a slicer partner of hers who conveniently had a job at a registry’s office in the Ring of Kafrene, of all places. The fem had teased Jyn endlessly when she opened the office for them afterhours about never supposing her friend Liana to have had a romantic side. Making a quip about there being nothing romantic about a mining colony, Jyn had hastily corrected her about her identity, gray green eyes cataloguing every little reaction on the clerk’s blue face. She asserted that she was keeping her name, which to Cassian’s ears sounded only fair, and after a few ritual questions, they exchanged rings, put their real signatures on a document and that was it. Their only witness was an Imperial droid Jyn had assured Iuna, her former associate, that he was trustworthy and would disappear in the opposite direction as them as soon as the ceremony was over.

They decided to keep Joreth and Kestrel’s rings as theirs, Jyn having surprised him with them by the time they were landing; they had been stored at the black trunk in which she had kept her personal effects, the same place from where he assumed she had produced the beaten brown jacket. He had sat down with K-2SO before that, to explain their decision. Cassian decided he had some other explaining to do.

“You must have wondered about how I wasn’t the one to upload your back-up.”

They had been sitting side by side in the cockpit, just like old days, except that it wasn’t, because he heard some tinkering and then a string of curses in at least three languages from behind him, which made something warm spread across his chest.

“Jyn told me the extent of your injuries. When I saw her – because I had no memories of Scarif –, I figured that something had happened. I assumed you had died with me.”

“Kay…”

The droid’s voice shook slightly, if that was possible, “she was very quick to reassure me of your status; she said you were very badly hurt and that she had taken it upon herself to restore me.”

“Kay, you have to know- you died because I made a mistake.”

“It was a suicide mission, Cassian. Let us just be glad it wasn’t the other way around. Organics don’t have the same luck as us droids.”

He had put his left hand on the droid’s new but slightly more battered chassis. His other one he clenched into a fist, because he could feel it start shaking out of its own free will. K-2 made a whirring noise.

“I still think that Jyn Erso is too unpredictable and too tiny a human to keep you safe. But I know that she is invested in your wellbeing and protection. So-“

Cassian dabbed at his eyes and shot the droid a look, “thank you, Kay.”

“You are welcome.”

He had sped past the cockpit access and locked himself in their cabin because he was not sure he wanted either Jyn or K-2 to see him cry.

So he walked back into her – their – shuttle with her hand firmly clasped in his, feeling her wedding ring under the fingerless glove in her left hand. As they settled in, she kissed him softly on the cheek before telling Kay to set their course for Thila.

Cassian had never imagined his life would come to this. As the heaps of bodies he left behind him in his fight for a better Galaxy, he grew to expect his own one day to be equally dispatched just as easily, and he had made his peace with that, because it could mean the difference for people who were more deserving than him to have a better life. On most days, he had no idea what he had done to deserve the woman pushing their ship through atmo and into the comforting chill of space, but whatever it was, in the five months he had spent away from her, he had begun to learn to be thankful for it, for her. The feel of Jyn Erso's green eyes on him made him feel closer and closer to the beliefs he remembered his parents having when he was child. And that didn’t make him waver in his wish to fight; it rather made that wish something even fiercer inside him.


	26. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All right: here it is. Can't believe I started this in July and finished it just in time for Rogue One's 1st anniversary.
> 
> Thank you, thank you, thank you for all who have read, left kudos, commented, subscribed and bookmarked. It means a lot for someone who decided to tackle a multichapter fic in English for the first time in 15 years. 
> 
> I have a few ideas for another story, but meanwhile, I'll be taking prompts on tumblr, if anyone's interested. I'm estherlyon on those parts as well. 
> 
> Thank you again and hope you all have a lovely Holiday season.

There was a viewport next to her, but Jyn didn’t bother looking through it. The ship had come out of hyperspace easily enough, but as soon as it broke into atmo, it started shaking beyond belief. One particular hardened operative across from her looked particularly ashen under the grime on his face and she shot him a rueful smile. She had been through this four times at least, in the thirteen months they had been stationed here, enough to know by now that their pilots had become especially deft at flying through blizzards. The huddled faces of the men and women with whom she was assigned in the elite extraction team reflected the brightness of the snow outside as she just willed the shaking to stop.

Soon enough, the rattling was over and Jyn started bracing herself for the change in temperature. One thing was the cold of space travel, quite another the biting chill of Hoth, that seemed to seep into one’s soul and leave it a shattering mess. Britt, a private in their team, started distributing their parkas as they rummaged for their duffle bags. They were all tired, others obviously shaken, some had superficial wounds. But they were all accounted for and that was enough for now. 

As soon as the ramp lowered and they were allowed out, she let her teammates scamper off, leaving her alone to gather her duffle and step out into the hangar of Echo Base, where the smell of tauntaun ration mixed with blaster oil and fuel. People in fluffy hooded parkas and heavy gloves walked around with surprising dexterity, climbing on and off X-Wings and U-Wings. She didn’t look around for anyone to be there to greet her, since she knew those who would bother were probably busy. The kyber under her shirt and the ring under her glove were enough for her at the moment, just as they had been in the two weeks she spent away.

Her duffle was smarting at her side, at a particularly painful spot, but she carried on, intent on at least dropping her bag in her quarters before checking if she needed to go to the medbay before her debrief.

As she walked into the tunnel that led in that direction, she heard her name called and the sound of jogging steps as Bodhi sidled up to her. In a reflex, she dropped her bag next to her on the floor. Bodhi now wore an orange Alliance fighter pilot uniform, one of the new ones, reinforced against the cold, and she marveled at how comfortable he seemed wearing it, for once. His arms came around her briefly, his gloved hands patting her on the back. With the movement that took to hug him back, she let out a muffled complaint, at which he stepped back, eyebrows raised.

“What is it?”

“Nothing. Just a scratch.”

He knew she hated fussing and that she would probably get a whole lot of it later, so the only sign of his worrying was his swiping her duffle bag up and off the floor and walking her to her room with a firm hand on her shoulder.

“Mission good, other than…?” he vaguely gestured at her torso.

“Yes, everyone’s back in one piece.”

“Long debrief ahead?”

“Yes, probably,” she struggled against a yawn as she tapped in the code at the door.

“I hate it that you can’t talk to me about it,” he mumbled.

Her quarters weren’t hers alone, otherwise they wouldn’t be as lived in as they were. There were two bunks, although only one was really used - the one farthest from the door -, a small ‘fresher and two desks. One of them was brimming with datapads, actual books and flimsies; the other was empty except for two working datapads and a lamp. Despite the evidence that there was always someone coming and going from it, the room was kept in order, only the occasional extra jacket draped neatly around a chair. She hung her heavy parka on the coat hanger by the door, the other peg notably bereft. Bodhi tossed the duffle on the empty bed. 

“It’s for your own sake, Bodhi, but I kind of hate it, too,” she replied.

“I’m going to let you, you know,” another vague gesture towards her body.

She laughed, “yeah, I probably need a shower.” 

“You haven’t looked in a mirror, right?” she shot him a look, “well, then, I’ll see you in the mess hall? Dinner’s bound to be up in a few, but I'll wait for you. Comm me or whatever.”

“Yeah, sure.” 

As soon as she was left alone, she headed into the small ‘fresher and looked at her reflection in the mirror. The woman looking back was no longer Kestrel Dawn, the logistics expert who had married an Imperial officer, but actually Jyn Erso, a lieutenant in Alliance intelligence responsible for one of the most efficient of General Draven’s extraction teams. And because of the sort of work they did, Jyn’s face was covered in soot.

Her new position within the Rebellion was far closer to her life with Saw Gerrera than it had been in the years previous to the Death Star’s destruction. Because of that familiarity, she thrived in it, mission after mission after mission. It didn’t involve disguises, other than impromptu ones, which meant no elaborate covers, none of what had been routine up to their settling on Hoth. Draven had been the first to admit that changes had to be made if they were to carry on and the influx of recruits after the Death Star was destroyed had helped him put them in place. Her new line of work, though, didn’t mean that Jyn didn’t occasionally come close to becoming one with the Force, as Chirrut would say -- to the despair of the man who kept their soap bottles all lined up with the labels facing forward in their ‘fresher.

Jyn turned on the heat and immediately started undressing, her fatigues peeling something off on _that_ side of her body that stung and that she didn’t want to think about. She tossed the clothes outside and then stepped just a bit to the right, under a showerhead, which sensing her presence, immediately began to spray hot water over her. It was one of the few advantages to the ice ball they were now based on: ice meant water, water that could be heated once they managed to build isolated ‘freshers. It meant the difference between their survival and their being driven to insanity. 

She watched as black soot and blood ran down the drain at her feet, then closed her eyes and started to rub soap on her body before she dared take a look at the skin over her ribs, under her right arm, where it was hurting to the point she felt pinpricks in her eyes. When she did, she saw a red and pink blaster burn that didn’t look entirely too bad, but because it was on skin that stretched and pulled with so many movements, it was probably going to hurt like hell for a few days. As soon as she was out of the water’s reach and dried, she grabbed a bacta patch from a box under the sink and breathed a little easily once it started settling on the wound.

Getting dressed on Hoth took a few moments longer than usual, but by now they had all become used to it: the thermal leggings and shirts, the padded vests and impermeable fatigues, the heavy boots and the gloves. Jyn liked fingerless ones and preferred scarves to hooded jackets. She felt a slight pang of hunger in her stomach, so she shuffled out of the room while tucking her gloves on, in the direction of the command center.

She walked swiftly, but in one particular tunnel someone grabbing her sleeve detained her. It was a testament to how much she had changed in her time within the Alliance that she didn’t throw an elbow in the person’s face.

“Erso, tell this moron that all of us had  previouslives we preferred before we got caught up in this fight,” it was Leia, exasperated.

The princess had lost the roundness of her face in the last three years and Jyn knew it wasn’t only because she had aged out of adolescence. Leia now that same hollowness she saw in Cassian’s face, which she knew mirrored her own: the hollowness of loss. Across from Leia, Han Solo stood tall and annoyed, though to an observer like Jyn, riveted by the woman he was arguing with. He rolled his eyes at her, while Leia glared daggers at him, words that she was restraining on the verge of spilling out of her mouth.

“I’m not very good with speeches, Leia,” she said, picking the princess’ fingers from her sleeve with unexpected gentleness and guessing wildly at the gist of their argument, “but yeah, Solo, we all had other things we’d rather have lived - any Rebel who tells you otherwise is probably lying. And our involvement here doesn’t mean we don’t get sick of it at times.” 

_If only you’d met Cassian and I before the Death Star._

Solo looked rightly admonished and didn’t say anything; just put his hands up in the air and walked away. Jyn looked at Leia to see if she was all right, noticing the younger woman’s clenched jaw. She loped her arm through hers and tugged her in the direction she was originally walking towards. Leia just followed silently; Jyn was one of the few people on base that she allowed seeing just how much arguing with Solo exhausted more than exasperated her, though Jyn knew she would never admit what all that effort on her part signified. Jyn wasn’t entirely sure Leia was even aware of it most of the time.

“You just got in?” the princess asked.

Jyn let go of her arm; it had only been a measure so Leia would focus on walking away.

“Yeah,” she replied absently and then shook her head, “no, actually. I had to shower.”

Leia raised an eyebrow, “what happened?”

“Hostage was being kept in a warehouse that was storing coal of all things,” she mumbled, slightly annoyed at the memory of not being able to breathe or see as the shoot out began with the local gangsters that had their operative; an operative they couldn’t afford to lose at the moment.

“Oh. So he’ll be anxious.”

“He knows how things are,” she lied more to herself than to Leia.

“Yeah, right,” they reached command center and Leia shot her a sardonic grin, “good luck.”

She let out a long-suffering sigh and palmed her way into the briefing room she had been assigned before they had landed. There were two men already there. The older one was sitting down, scrolling through a datapad, while the other, his superior officer, was on his feet, hands behind his back, right hand clasping his left wrist, which had his fingers curled. Something glinted off them and snagged at Jyn’s chest, making her feel for the first time the relief of being alive and whole.

“Lieutenant,” he said, without looking at her and she took that as permission to drop onto a chair.

“Major,” she greeted back, tucking her tongue against her back teeth for a second, because she had always found that ranks and formality were as annoying as getting toffee stuck to them. She nodded at his aide and the man returned the gesture.

“I’m to understand your delay here was unavoidable?”

“Yes,” she replied, “there was a shoot-out inside the warehouse and I had to check to see if I didn’t need medical.”

_Best to get that out of the way._

“You were shot,” he was looking at her now, his face blank.

“Glancing wound,” she replied curtly, “I put a patch on it.” 

He was now holding on to the edge of the table, still standing, which meant that his back was giving him trouble from sitting too long and he was putting his weight on his left leg. If he kept that up, Jyn knew that before lights out, the muscles on the left side of his lower back would be mottled with contractures. When he noticed that she was noticing, he shot her a look and sat down in front of her. His brow was creased and by now, they had had enough debriefs like this for her not to have to restrain herself not to reach out and run her fingers on his forehead and up into his hair. She kept her hands firmly resting on the table before her.

It came with their arrangement to be discreet at all costs, made when Draven decided to make him his second in command. Even as they dissembled after Yavin IV was evacuated, Draven had let them know that Cassian wouldn’t be long in the field. His wounds after Scarif were never going to not bother him, he had been close to having a break-down before even shipping out on the rogue mission, and so Draven knew that he had to shuffle things a bit if it meant saving one of his best agents. Three years in and it had put a touch of grey on Cassian’s sideburns, his eyes a little bit more lined and always, always tired, but it filled Jyn’s heart with a different kind of ease, knowing that he would almost always be on base, even if working himself into Hoth’s icy ground. 

She catalogued the little signs of weariness on his part as she detailed how her mission had played out, the shoot out, the rescue and drop of their operative in a safe house on a little backwater planet. She only ever paid attention to what she was saying in order to elicit predictable reactions from him and the fact that he was letting her get away with it was one huge sign that he had probably had little sleep and that he was treating the debrief as a formality. She made little mental notes, about a heating pad, stealing some food back into their room, little measures of comfort that she could think of, as if he was the one arriving from a long mission with a blaster burn on his side. On the outside, she knew they looked like a couple of officers on an ordinary debrief session, though. He must have sensed something about her, though, because he splayed his hands on the table at one point and told her that she could go, that he would only need her to review a few reports the next morning.

 _Next morning._  

At that, she allowed herself to shoot him a certain look, which she knew he noticed because his pupils dilated a bit. She nodded at both men before she got up and promptly left the briefing room.

 

**

 

She had dinner with Bodhi; some sort of soup that tasted at least like something akin to nerf meat and whose heat she felt seep into her bones, making her finally feel drowsy after the last thirty-six hours, along with bread that felt a bit like duraplast. When she finished, she dropped the metal spoon in the bowl, leaned back in her seat and looked up to find Bodhi blinking both eyes at her in fondness.

“You should go to bed,” he said, “before I have to carry you like the last times you decided to wait up for Cassian.”

She just made a clucking noise at him, but nodded before slipping out of the booth and hugging him goodnight. The burn on her ribs was bothering her and the first night on Hoth after a mission was always the most difficult. When she slipped under the covers in the bunk in their room, dressed down to her underwear, she tried to ignore the twinge of longing and guilt at not being able to wait up.

It seemed like only a few seconds had gone by when she felt something hot and something cold. Cold hands tucked themselves around her belly at which she jumped, and then was struck by the warmth of a mouth against the back of her neck. Cassian had taken to keeping his beard in a short scruff that she had learned was his normal and it scratched the nape of her neck just in the right way. She leaned back into him, into his warmth, and she felt like something might burst in her, this feeling of being loved and how it never faded whenever they met alone after she came back from a mission.

“Welcome home,” he mumbled, his accent clouded with exhaustion.

She laced her fingers through his, rubbing his hands against her warm skin.

“You should wear gloves,” she whispered into her pillow.

One of his hands slipped up and though for a brief second she felt something curl in her in expectation, she braced herself for what he would find.

“Bacta,” he mumbled, his fingers finding the edge of the patch that she had felt too lazy to change when she took off her fatigues.

“’s fine.”

He tucked her against him more firmly, braced her head against his neck so he could breathe over her head. She had kept her eyes firmly closed, but now opened them, turned around but found that lying on the side of the blaster burn was impossible, so she sat up, dragging one of the blankets with her.

“What?” he asked, dropping back to lie facing upwards.

She ran a playful finger over his nose. It never failed to hit her, how beautiful he looked, even weary and wrecked with all sorts of cricks on his neck and tiredness in his soft eyes.

“Your back?”

 _“’s fine_ ,” he mimicked, amusing her with a rendition of her own Core accent.

“Anything happen when we were away?”

“A few supply runs were good. Leia and Solo got into all sorts of arguments the last time they were sent out together. Skywalker has apparently tired of interfering.”

“Good for him,” she whispered, lowering herself to lie half on top of him, running a hand over his bad leg. He twitched under her and she nuzzled the spot behind his ear.

“I think he might leave soon.”

“Solo.”

“Yes,” he smoothed a hand over her spine, turned his face to kiss her and she realized they hadn’t done that since he had come into the room.

He tasted of their standard issue toothpaste with just a bit of bad caff underneath, but mostly tasted of him. She tugged at his shirt and he shimmied out of it, letting her and the blanket protect him against the chill, and she relished in the firmness beneath her, in the steadiness of him. He wasn’t a large man, had never been, and she had always liked that he seemed more litheness than strength, despite the fact that he was now turning her under the blanket with just a quick motion.

“How long do you think we’ll last out here?” she asked, as he slipped her leg over his waist and rubbed against all the right bits of her body.

He barely drew his lips from her shoulder and started making his way down her torso, “we’ve heard something about probe droids.”

“Not long, then,” he tapped at her hipbone and she lifted up so he could tug off the whole of her underwear.

“Not long,” he said, nosing down, breathing over her, and when she bucked under him, he huffed a laugh, which made things worse – or better, she couldn’t decide, “just like some people, as we can see here.”

“Shut up,” she said through gritted teeth, snagging at his hair for purchase.

“Gladly.”

 

**

 

The probe droid arrived two days later. Skywalker himself was on patrol and after relaying the information, disappeared for a whole night, taking Solo with him, when the smuggler went to investigate the whereabouts of his friend. Jyn was helping Cassian out with evacuation procedures, so she only had the time to stand with Leia and Chewbacca at the hangar for a bit while a heavy blanket of consternation fell over Echo Base with the absence of the young man who had first proposed its existence. He and Solo were found the next morning, Luke bleeding and unconscious after what looked like a wampa attack. Meanwhile, Dodonna had ordered them to evacuate. 

It was one of those times when Jyn deeply sympathized with Han Solo. The man was brash and cocky, but the look in his eyes when he marched into command center to drag Leia out as chaos erupted around them wasn’t dissimilar to the one she was wearing when plucking Cassian from his chair, ice falling from the ceiling and the walls as ‘troopers and Force knew what else stormed the base. He knew better than to argue with her. 

“Who’s going to run intelligence if you and Draven are gone?” she barked as she shoved him along, truncheon in one hand and two blasters elsewhere on her body, eyes wide with anger. 

He glared at her, but kissed her fiercely when she shoved him into the last transport available and when she tasted his mouth on hers, half-inside the ship, he felt him grab her fiercely and force her inside along with him, whispering, begging her not to go back to the fight, his eyes haunted with a planet in which snow was replaced with sunshine, palm trees and the smell of ozone. Dodonna’s voice came over the comlink, ordering them all off planet as soon as possible. There was nothing they could do here, not with the comm chatter saying that there were AT-ATs marching around in the snow. She grabbed her comlink and hoarsely yelled Bodhi’s name until she had ascertained that he was already on the way to the rendezvous point.

She turned to Cassian, hearing the zinging of blasters and feeling the ground underneath them shake with explosions, and nodded at him, her heart lurching with the loss of their home – however briefly it had been so to them -, of it being once more torn to shreds.

She grabbed her kyber crystal with one hand, leaned hard against Cassian and the shuttle wall, and braced for take off.  


End file.
